Stem cell gene therapy has been used to treat a fatal genetic brain disease - Sanfilippo, which in human children causes progressive dementia and death - in mice for the first time. 

The researchers are hoping to begin a clinical trial within two years.

Male guppies must not be very sexy, because they have evolved an extreme way to hold on to a female that interests them, even if that affection is unrequited: claws on their genitals to make it more difficult for unreceptive females to get away during mating.

Walking helps people in lots of ways but a paper in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (now JAMA Pediatrics) has a new benefit; adolescent girls who walk to school show a cognitive boost compared to girls who travel by bus or car.

But distance matters. Girls who walk more than 15 minutes showed more benefit than those who live closer and have a shorter walk to school.

The results come from findings of the nationwide AVENA (Food and Assessment of the Nutritional Status of Spanish Adolescents) study, which they say is the first international study that associates mode of commuting to school and cognitive performance.

Some people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future.  They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil sells to the public in books (and now from a nice gig at Google also).

The rate of unnecessary cancer scans for low-risk prostate cancer patients - the kind of defensive medicine that is a large chunk of medical costs in America - plummeted in Sweden in the decade following a joint campaign to curtail such tests by Swedish County Councils and the National Prostate Cancer Register (NPCR) of Sweden. 

The results in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggest that reducing the costs of healthcare in the US - an urgent priority now that the government has mandated it and intends to subsidize it - can be achieved without significant risk.

What's the diet for a high performance athlete? Despite the cultural pendulum of fad diets swinging back toward fat, high fiber, low-fat foods balanced with a training regimen remains the best way to maintain muscle while burning fat.

There are valley networks branching across the Martian surface, which makes it reasonable to believe that water once flowed on the Red Planet.

Where water might have come from would be another mystery. Whether it bubbled up from underground or fell as rain or snow is the subject of speculation and debate but a new study says it can put a new check mark in the 'precipitation' column. The authors say that water-carved valleys at four different locations on Mars appear to have been caused by runoff from orographic precipitation — snow or rain that falls when moist prevailing winds are pushed upward by mountain ridges.

On May 27th, 2006 the ground on Java, an Indonesian island, shook with a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. The epicenter was located 25 km southwest of the city of Yogyakarta and initiated at a depth of 12 km.

The earthquake took thousands of lives, injured ten thousand more and destroyed buildings and homes. 47 hours later, about 250 km from the earthquake hypocenter, a mud volcano formed that came to be known as "Lusi", short for "Lumpur Sidoarjo". 

Hot mud erupted in the vicinity of an oil drilling-well, shooting mud up to 50 m into the sky and flooding the area. It continues to erupt today and scientists expect the mud volcano to be active for many more years

Eruption of mud volcano was natural - not an oil well

My vague libertarian leanings want me to stay out of the marijuana issue, just like I don't interfere in vaginas and just like I think the government should stop micromanaging gold fish and Big Gulps and telling restaurants whether or not to allow a cigar after a great steak.

But marijuana has become a political issue and it has fallen along predictable political lines; if you think cigarettes should be banned and marijuana legalized, I know how you vote. And therefore the people suddenly presenting nonsense statistics, dubious medical claims and sociological woo are seemingly doing it because they want to stick it to right wing people who are against pot.  That's not science, people.

Global warming is on hold, at least temporarily, and being five years behind means we have time for a legitimate basic research solution to become viable technology.

A classic trash-to-treasure story would be producing electricity from carbon dioxide. A new method uses CO₂ from electric power plant and other smokestacks as the raw material for making electricity.