In gene therapy, one or more desired genes are introduced into an adenovirus, a virus that causes the common cold, which is then administered to the patient. Once in the body, the virus enters targeted cells and delivers the desired genes. In heart disease patients, for example, the virus delivers genes that trigger the growth of new blood vessels in damaged heart muscle.

Every 100,000 years a "super-eruption" of a major volcanic system occurs - one of the most catastrophic natural events on Earth - yet it's hard to know what triggers these violent explosions.

The eruption of super-volcanoes dwarfs the eruptions of recent volcanoes and can trigger planetary climate change by inducing Ice Ages and other impacts. One such event was the Huckleberry Ridge eruption of present-day Yellowstone Park about two million years ago, which was more than 2,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington. These super-eruptions are second only to meteor strikes in their impact.

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 11th is Myths and Legends Day.

And what better way to celebrate than with an account of the newly discovered Triassic Kraken, you know, the one who made a self-portrait with the vertebral discs of dinosaurs a couple of millions years ago?

Good news for migraine sufferers.  Your treatment may have gotten a little cheaper.  Exercise is often prescribed as a treatment for migraine, though without sufficient scientific evidence that it really works, but research from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg shows that exercise is just as good as drugs at preventing migraines. And so are relaxation techniques.

Electrocrystallization, electric-field-induced phase transformation, predicts that under the influence of sufficiently high electric fields, liquid droplets of certain materials will undergo solidification, forming crystallites at temperature and pressure conditions that correspond to liquid droplets at field-free conditions. A study in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C says they have done it.

The researchers set out first to explore a phenomenon described by Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor in 1964 in the course of his study of the effect of lightning on raindrops, expressed as changes in the shape of liquid drops when passing through an electric field.

In Jewish and Christian tradition, Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Recent evidence shows that multiple writers had a hand in composing the text of the Torah and the other books of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament are also thought to be composites.
 

Global warming is bad but at least we have a chance to control it.  Simple life hundreds of millions of years ago had to just go with the flow so when global glaciation put a chill on things back then, the only way even simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived was in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today's Red Sea, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.

The U.S. military has its own judicial system.  If you commit an infraction, you are charged under the Uniform Court of Military Justice. This keeps the military from becoming a political football. The four other professions also have their own internal monitoring system. For example, even if you do not commit a criminal act as an attorney, you can still be disbarred for conduct outside their rules.

I read with interest and some amusement (on the mouse joke) the piece written here by Sascha Vongehr. I find his arguments wrong and decided to answer him in the comments thread of his post, but my answer got a bit too long and I did not want to hijack a nice discussion that was developing there; plus I found out that what I was writing could be suitable for this blog in its own right. So below I explain what I criticize about his arguments.