To astrobiologists, hot springs hold a great deal of significance. Many of the most ancient organisms on Earth thrived in and around hydrothermal springs and their modern descendants still do.
If life forms have ever been present on Mars, hot spring deposits would be ideal locations to search for physical or chemical evidence of these organisms and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggesting there might be evidence of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater would be a fine place to look, according to a report in Astrobiology.
Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been known to exert a cooling effect on climate. This has partly masked the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases. As aerosol pollution is predicted to decrease over the next few decades, unmasking of the greenhouse effect may lead to accelerated global warming.
Research performed in the Center for Biomolecular Science&Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that mobile repetitive elements--also known as transposons or "jumping genes"--do indeed affect the evolution of gene regulatory networks.
A little more than a year after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists showed they could turn skin cells back into stem cells, they have pulsating proof that these "induced" stem cells can indeed form the specialized cells that make up heart muscle.
In a study published in Circulation Research, the team showed that they were able to grow working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) from induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells.
The heart cells were originally reprogrammed from human skin cells by James Thomson and Junying Yu, two of Kamp's co-authors on the study.
In all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider during the last few years, it was easy to miss the fact that low energy physics was still accomplishing a lot - and that no one was sure what the LHC could really do because we didn't know what needed discovering.
What we think it will do is based on the success of the indirect approach in science. Darwin's evolution by natural selection, for example, gained early acceptance because without it nothing much in biology made sense. Later discoveries including genetics and a detailed fossil record reaffirmed that what makes the most sense can often be true.
I recently spoke to biological anthropologist
Dr. Helen Fisher about her groundbreaking work on the chemical basis of our personality and its influence on who we fall in love with. As it turns out, science can shed a lot of light on a topic previously dominated by doubt, horoscopes, and what our mama told us.
“So have you read the book?” asked Fisher. “What ‘type’ are you?”
“Explorer/Negotiator. Are you sizing me up according to my ‘type’ now?” I teased.
The Brits are always thinking ahead and we could learn a thing or two from them on this side of the pond. Those cheeky blokes are ditching pricey baubles in favor of if-we-keep-printing-money-we-will-be-Zimbabwe type ways of romancing loved ones this Valentine's Day - that is to say, without throwing out a lot of dough.
Research from a voice-to-text company over there called SpinVox claims almost two thirds of men (65%) have made huge cuts in spending this Valentines day. 1.6 million even claim they are following in the footsteps of Byron, Keats, and Shakespeare; not just by being poor, struggling lotharios getting by on charm but also by penning their own love poems this February 14th.
I am a firm believer in the possibility and promise of embryonic stem cells. In a politically, religiously and even scientifically charged climate, this is a risky thing to announce. But as a journalist, I must divorce myself from my own personal opinions and biases and present the facts.
That being said, it is still satisfying writing upon a topic that you believe in. This was the case when
I wrote an article about Geron Pharmaceuticals recently launched human clinical trials using embryonic stem cell research to repair spinal cord damage.
Today, of all days, anything is possible. The laws of man and god are subverted by that of Murphy. This day is made doubly potent by its placement before the geek's darkest day of the year: Valentine's Day. And during this day on which anything that can go wrong will go wrong, it seems that even the cold truth of mathematics itself has failed. Specifically, two equals one. Damn. You shoulda been more consistent with the salt, garlic and Haitian door totems.
A York University research team has tracked the migration of songbirds, the most common type of bird in our skies, by outfitting them with tiny geolocator backpacks – a world first and interesting because they are too small for conventional satellite tracking. They now say we have underestimated the flight performance of songbirds dramatically.
