A new study identifies the BCL11A gene is especially active in aggressive subtypes of breast cancer. The research suggests that an overactive BCL11A gene drives triple-negative breast cancer development and progression. The research, which was done in human cells and in mice, provides new routes to explore targeted treatments for this aggressive tumor type.

There are many types of breast cancers that respond differently to treatments and have different prognoses. Approximately one in five patients is affected by triple-negative breast cancer; these cancers lack three receptor proteins that respond to hormone therapies used for other subtypes of breast cancer. In recent years it has become apparent that the majority of triple-negative tumors are of the basal-like subtype.

For patients with spinal stenosis, long-term outcomes are comparable with surgery or conservative treatment, according to a new study.

While earlier reports suggested an advantage of surgery, the updated analysis finds no significant difference in pain, functioning, of disability at eight years' follow-up, report Dr Jon D. Lurie and colleagues of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H. The results--representing the largest and highest-quality study to date--provide new evidence on what patients can expect several years after deciding whether or not to have or not have surgery for spinal stenosis.

Better Initial Results with Spinal Stenosis Surgery...

This morning I woke up at 6AM, had a shower and breakfast, dressed up, and rushed out in the cold of the fading night to catch a train to Mestre, where my car was parked. From there I drove due north for two hours, to a place in the mountains called Pieve di Cadore. A comfortable ride in normal weather, but this morning the weather was horrible, with an insisting water bombing from above which slowly turned to heavy sleet as I gained altitude. The drive was very unnerving as my car is old and not well equipped for these winter conditions - hydroplaning was frequent. But I made it.

Dolphins and seals have had eons to adapt to aquatic life, but they can still be taxed while pushing the boundaries, according to a paper in Nature Communications which found a surprisingly high frequency of heart arrhythmias in bottlenose dolphins and Weddell seals - at least during their deepest dives. 

Two miles below the surface of the ocean, researchers have discovered new microbes that "breathe" sulfate. These microbes, which have yet to be classified and named, exist in massive undersea aquifers -- networks of channels in porous rock beneath the ocean where water continually churns.

About one-third of the Earth's biomass is thought to exist in this largely uncharted environment.

Sulfate is a compound of sulfur and oxygen that occurs naturally in seawater. It is used commercially in everything from car batteries to bath salts and can be aerosolized by the burning of fossil fuels, increasing the acidity of the atmosphere.

Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn't actually commit.

The new work provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years. The research in Psychological Science indicates that the participants came to internalize the stories they were told, providing rich and detailed descriptions of events that never actually took place.

Funding for institutions of higher education in Norway is partially determined by how many publications their employees produce. While there are already six troubling problems with this system, one of them is about to get much, much worse.

A group of experts was commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Research to suggest improvements in the financing system. Their report includes one proposal that is not only mathematically garbled; it is also an incentive to corruption.

Scientists propose a new, potentially more accurate way, to measure the rate of sea level rise. Shutterstock

By Carling Hay, Harvard University

When you ask yourself what the biggest unanswered scientific questions are, “how did sea levels change over the past 100 years?” is unlikely to appear at the top of your list.

By Monica Grady, The Open University

Landing a spacecraft on a celestial body, whether it be the moon, Mars or a comet, is not easy. The European Space Agency found out the hard way in 2003 when its robot Beagle2, which was supposed to send back a signal after landing on Mars, didn’t do so.

But more than a decade after it went missing, the UK Space Agency has announced that the the elusive Beagle2 lander has been re-discovered.

In 1973, during a symposium to celebrate the 500th birthday of Copernicus, Brandon Carter, a post-doctoral researcher in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, tweaked his audience by stating that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe - the exact opposite of what scientists from Copernicus on have said.

Since then, it has gone in and out of fashion, and the Anthropic Principle, as it was called, was most recently embraced in some M-Theory flavors of string theory.