Netflix launched its million dollar contest—improve their movie rating prediction system by 10%—nearly three years ago, and like most computer science graduate students, I downloaded the data and got to work. The 10% mark proved a magic number for Netflix. 6% and the competition would have been over in a few months; 11% and it might never have ended. Next week (July 26, 2009), the winners will be announced.

Yesterday I wrote how Anthony Wesley, who hails from Canberra, Australia, grabbed this shot of a new dark spot near the south pole of Jupiter.

It's left to bigger minds (and bigger telescopes) than mine to sort out what caused it but while the blogosphere has been buzzing, JPL has been observing.

Researchers writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say they have discovered that the sea lamprey, which emerged from jawless fish first appearing 500 million years ago, dramatically remodels its genome. Shortly after a fertilized lamprey egg divides into several cells, the growing embryo discards millions of units of its DNA - one fifth of its genome. 

Mayo Clinic investigators say a proof-of-concept study has demonstrated that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be used to treat heart disease.  iPS cells are stem cells converted from adult stem cells so don't involve the ethical concerns involved in using human embryonic stem cells.

In their study, the researchers reprogrammed ordinary fibroblasts, cells that contribute to scars such as those resulting from a heart attack, converting them into stem cells that fix heart damage caused by infarction.

This is the first application of iPS-based technology for heart disease therapy. Previously iPS cells have been used on only three other disease models: Parkinson's disease, sickle cell anemia and hemophilia A.

As silly as it may look, I am going to start this post by publishing for the third time in a row the same figure. That is because I want to keep the promise I made earlier that I would explain in terms as simple as possible (although not simpler) the details hidden behind the coloured curves and functions pictured there. I will also take this chance to come down a little from the level of technicality of the recent posts: after all, this blog is supposedly for everybody, and not just for Ph.D. students and recipients.

Neanderthals were stoutly-built and human-like and lived at the same time and in the same areas as some modern humans.  But they went extinct.

Anthropologists have tried to solve the mystery of Neanderthal's fate since the first fossils were discovered in the small valley of the river Düssel called Neandertal, about 7 miles east of Düsseldorf in Germany.

Speculation is they they inter-bred with modern humans or failed to compete for food or resources  or perhaps were even hunted to extinction by humans.

Stars don't die without being noticed and sometimes the results are pretty spectacular.  At the end of its life cycle, a star begins to collapse and throws new material into space, which eventually becomes incorporated into new planets and life.

How evolution can bridge the gap between two discrete physiological states is a question that puzzles biologists and therefore delights critics.

Most evolutionary changes happen in tiny increments; an elephant grows a little larger, a giraffe's neck a little longer and if those tiny changes prove advantageous there is a better chance of passing them to the next generation, which might then add its own mutations until you may end up with a huge pachyderm or the stretched neck of a giraffe.

But when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect or limbs on a primate there is no apparent middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made?

Ever say someone's actions were 'in their genes'?   That's not only a simplification, according to a group of University of Iowa scientists, scientists who have debated nature versus nurture for centuries are guilty of 'intellectual laziness.'

They support evolution but not the idea that genes are a one-way path to specific traits and behaviors. Instead, they argue that development involves a complex system in which genes and environmental factors constantly interact.

Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object like a star can curve space and time, has been successfully used to predict the bending of starlight by the sun, small shifts in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.