Rain in Southern Arizona is usually scarce - but on November 29th, 25 miles north of Tucson, the soil was soaked. Spouting from a network of pipes, thousands of gallons of water drizzled down onto the world's only and largest man-made experimental watershed, recently completed at the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2.  You can read articles from original Biosphere 2 scientist Jane Poynter here.

Women suffering from sleep apnea have a higher degree of brain damage than men with the disorder, according to a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA School of Nursing.  

Obstructive sleep apnea is a serious disorder that occurs when a person's breathing is repeatedly interrupted during sleep, sometimes hundreds of times. Each time, the oxygen level in the blood drops, eventually resulting in damage to many cells in the body. If left untreated, it can lead to high blood pressure, stroke, heart failure, diabetes, depression and other serious health problems. 10 years ago, this UCLA research team showed that men with obstructive sleep apnea have damage to their brain cells.  

Drinking three to four cups of delicious coffee each day may help prevent type 2 diabetes, according to research published by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC). Really, that is an actual organization dedicated to promoting the health benefits of coffee.  Some skepticism might ordinarily be warranted but since this is about coffee, it is okay to just accept the science.

Apple's Siri sounds like she cares about your needs, but she is faking it.  But some research by a team of engineers shown at the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology describes a new computer program that gauges human feelings through speech with substantially greater accuracy than existing approaches. 

Some day you may have a smart phone that identifies your mood.

Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn't live a charmed life; it survives on a diet of roundworm, which isn't all that appealing, but the discovery of a team led by Mingjun Zhang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, could give the fungus's life more purpose—as a cancer fighter. 

They discovered that nanoparticles produced by A. oligospora hold promise for stimulating the immune system and killing tumors. 

I like to think of palaeontology as a historical science. We use science as a tool to speculate and test ideas about the history of life on Earth. The alternative is mythology, where we create ideas about the history of life to make a good story, without any grounding in fact.

Take the question, “how did the rhinoceros get its skin”. On the one hand, we have a scientific study in 2009; that compares folding across many rhinoceroses and examines the blood vessel network. They suggest that the skin evolved its folds to help keep the rhino cool. Rudyard Kipling, however, gives us another hypothesis.

Plants grow upward from a tip of undifferentiated tissue called the shoot apical meristem. As the tip extends, stem cells at the center of the meristem divide and increase in numbers and the cells on the periphery differentiate to form plant organs, such as leaves and flowers. In between these two layers, a group of boundary cells go into a quiescent state and form a barrier that not only separates stem cells from differentiating cells, but eventually forms the borders that separate the plant's organs. 

Probiotics are the miracle product of the decade because of the belief they can help cultivate “intestinal flora”, whatever that is supposed to mean.  It's a $32 billion industry by 2014 but there is one species that scientists can confirm have a benefit - zebrafish.

The Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology found that feeding probiotics to baby zebrafish accelerated their development and increased their chances of survival into adulthood.

We can read words and phrases and even solve multi-step mathematical problems without conscious awareness, say a team of psychologists at the Hebrew University.

They conducted experiments which they say constitutes a challenge to existing ideas of unconscious processes; namely that reading and solving math problems, complex, rule-based operations, require consciousness.