In a little less than three weeks, a federal budget sequestration, which would have severe consequences for agencies that fund scientific research, will take effect unless a deal can be made between Republicans and Democrats. That’s a pretty discomforting sentence to write.

Discussions on the effect of sequestration on science research tend to focus on academia, and rightly so, since it will be the academics that are most directly impacted. But that is just the beginning—a very bad beginning—to the ripple effect that sequestration would have. Private companies that depend on the research industry would also be hit, and those companies are making sure that their concerns are heard.

Bacteria have lived for millions of years in our planet where, with an impressive capability to adapt, they now colonize virtually every environment, including us. But as tiny one-cell organisms they had to learn to work together to be powerful enough to act on the environment and other organisms. And now, new research has discovered that their evolution is triggered exactly by these interactions, as scientists from Centre for Environmental Biology at the University of Lisbon in Portugal and the Institute Pasteur in Paris show that bacteria’s genes for secreted proteins - the ones that mediate the interactions with the outside - evolve faster than any others in the genome. 

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected seven primitive galaxies formed more than 13 billion years ago, and also a candidate, at redshift 11.9, for the record for the most distant galaxy found to date. 

The images offer the deepest ever view of the Universe at near-infrared wavelengths, which capture the redshifted light of early galaxies. Because light takes so long to travel from these remote objects, astronomers are looking back in time and seeing those galaxies as they appeared just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

Do you prefer to have a few close friends or a larger social circle that is less deep? Social psychologists say your preference reflect your personality but also individual circumstances - like socioeconomic conditions.

This is a post about basics. That's because I think a point needs to be made which is surprisingly not as well-known as its elementary nature would have you guess.

Correlation -in its most used version, due to Pearson- is a measure of how two quantities can be observed to be in linear dependence on one another. It is a very common quantity to report the results of scientific studies, particularly but not exclusively in the social sciences. Researchers try to evidence the presence of a correlation between two phenomena as a preliminary step to investigating whether one can be the cause of the other.

The slow loris (Nycticebus) is a primate genus closely related to the lemur and found across South East Asia, from Bangladesh and China's Yunnan province to the island of Borneo.

The slow loris is rare amongst primates for having a toxic bite, and is rated as Vulnerable or Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Maybe not so endangered, since researchers have found a brand new species.  A team's analysis of the primate's distinctive facial fur markings, published in the American Journal of Primatology, reveals the existence of one entirely new species, while two possible sub-species are being officially recognized as unique. 

A miniature extraterrestrial version of Africa's Nile River Valley has been spotted on Saturn’s moon Titan - it stretches more than 400 km from its "headwaters" to a large sea.  

Have you ever before seen such a large river system in high resolution outside Earth?  No, you have not. 

Scientists deduce that the river is filled with liquid because it appears dark along its entire extent in the high-resolution radar image, indicating a smooth surface.   Titan is the only other world we know of that has stable liquid on its surface. While Earth’s hydrologic cycle relies on water, Titan’s equivalent cycle involves hydrocarbons such as ethane and methane.

Today it is common to refer to sugar and high-fructose corn syrup as "sugary ingredients." Sugar produced from sugar cane or sugar beets is called sucrose, which is a chemical compound in which glucose and fructose -- two different six-carbon, so-called simple sugars -- are chemically bound together.

In January of 2012, a new X-ray source flared and rapidly brightened in the Andromeda galaxy (M31), l2.5 million light-years from earth. The event was classified as an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), the second ever seen in M31 and efforts with X-ray telescopes and radio observatories resulted in the first detection of radio-emitting jets from a stellar-mass black hole outside our own galaxy.

A ULX is thought to be a binary system containing a black hole that is rapidly accreting gas from its stellar companion. To account for the high-energy output, gas must be flowing into the black hole at a rate very near a theoretical maximum - which astronomers do not yet fully understand.

Retinoblastoma tumor suppressor proteins is, shall we say, untraditional.  But it could mean new ways to treat cancer.

As an organism grows, proteins essential for fueling its prosperity typically toe a tight line, performing their jobs at the right place and time. If these proteins go rogue, disasters such as cancer can result.