Girls are gathering online to remake action-oriented Japanese animation videos geared toward males - you know, because males are genetically engineered to like action cartoons with bounty hunter vampires who need to kill their half-brothers that run an evil clan - into romances, because girls are genetically engineered to like ... well, you get the point.   

Anime is a style of animation popularized in Japan, usually in material that contains action-filled plots with fantastic or futuristic themes. The style is used in manga, computer games and videos.

Organ donation would be a lot less variable if they could be grown in the lab and a more effective way to build plastic scaffolds on which new tissues and even whole organs might be grown in the laboratory is being developed by an international collaboration between teams in Portugal and the UK.

The researchers say rapid prototyping, or three-dimensional(3-D) 'printing', could enable tissue engineering that replicates the porous and hierarchical structures of natural tissues at an unprecedented level.

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team say their discovery of shorelines on Mars is an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.

Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep, roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. The shoreline evidence, found along a broad delta, included a series of alternating ridges and troughs thought to be surviving remnants of beach deposits.

Scientists who discovered a beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China called Limusaurus inextricabilis ("mire lizard who could not escape") say it demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought.  Even more, they write in Nature that it offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.

It's easy to get lost in a eukaryotic cell. Proteins need to be in the right place at the right time to carry out their functions, but the cell is a crowded place, and the layout isn't exactly simple. Fortunately, the cell has a fairly sophisticated transportation system: if you need to head out of the cell, take the secretory pathway; if your job is to regulate genes, the nuclear shuttle will take you where you need to go.



The protein Htb2 hanging out exactly where it is supposed to be - the nucleus

Some mammoths remained part of British wildlife long after they were believed (scientifically) to have become extinct, according to research published today in the Geological Journal.

Analysis of both the bones and the surrounding environment in Shropshire, England provide the most geologically recent evidence of woolly mammoths in western Europe, they say.

There must have been an abundant source of free energy on the early Earth that could produce the polymers required for natural experiments leading to the origin of life.

What was it?

When a steep decline in the wool trade prompted an 18th century credit crunch, folks in Yorkshire took up a new (and dangerous) business venture - counterfeiting.

In the 18th century, coining was a treasonable offense and therefore punishable by death but in the 1760s and 1770s, a decline in the textile trade motivated hundreds of Yorkshire people from rural communities to risk the gallows by counterfeiting British and Spanish coins. 

Living in an area with more fast food outlets and convenience stores than supermarkets and grocers has been associated with obesity in a Canadian study published by BMC Public Health.

Correlation/causation misfire?   Sure, unless you want to believe that the government should put up a fresh food stand within a half mile of your house to keep you from becoming obese. 

The clothing industry discovered decades ago that a mix of natural and synthetic fibers, like taking cotton and adding polyester, can make clothing that's soft, breathable and wrinkle free.

Now researchers at the University of Washington are using the same principle for biomedical applications. Mixing chitosan, found in the shells of crabs and shrimp, with an industrial polyester creates a promising new material for the tiny tubes that support repair of a severed nerve, and could serve other medical uses. The hybrid fiber combines the biologically favorable qualities of the natural material with the mechanical strength of the synthetic polymer.