I was away from the site for a while now. I have a good excuse for it since all this while- I got my Ph.D. award, my work recognized by my peers and took up a new job – all at one time. Dynamics of my life were seemingly distracting me from writing. However, now I have settled, I am back to writing and blogging. Reading the opening lines, you may have realized that I was quite stressed up with my life, grappling all the frontiers together in a single time frame.

In an open science community like Science 2.0, people will feel like they can just sign up and babble about anything and if you protest that what they are doing is not really science (wormholes, brand new theory of everything, social psychology, etc.), they will object with a few predictable responses certain to make everyone chuckle. They go something like; Galileo was oppressed too, Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk, etc.

Researchers have documented the first fossil-based evidence supporting an evolutionary theory of aging, which predicts that species evolving in low mortality and resource-limited ecosystems tend to be more long-lived.

But that is not an endorsement of banning guns and caloric restriction. It's a little more complicated than that.

Although the jury had the case, the Judge Rotenberg Center settled with Andre McCollins' mother yesterday. Fox 25 News in Boston has covered this case diligently, and its article about the settlement writes, "But the attorney representing the Judge Rotenberg Center is not owning up to any mistakes."

Take a look at the photos from your last sun-soaked vacation: the morning light is warm and reddish while the midday sun is much hotter and blue.

Now compare that happy spectrum with the monochrome lights in your home or office, which are the same all day. No wonder you felt glum after you flew home. “Our biology is dependent on the variability of light through the day and through the seasons,” says Gary Allen, a lighting physicist at GE. “Artificial lighting is the same all day long.”

Climate change is in its fifth decade of being the big concern. In the 1960s and 70s, it was a cooling worry but now there is a warming one.  A constant in mammal's surviving numerous climate upheavals throughout earth history has been diversity - the relative range and distribution of mammalian families remained strikingly consistent throughout major climate changes over the past 56 million years.

During the Middle Palaeolithic, between 127,000 and 40,000 years ago, humans that lived along the banks of the river Manzanares (now Madrid, Spain) ate pachyderm meat and bone marrow, according to a study that found percussion and cut marks on elephant remains in the site of Preresa.

So if you want to try a fad paleolithic diet, get a cheap spear and see how you do bringing one of those babies down first.

I may have mentioned before that squid fishermen of the Falkland Islands go after two very different species: Illex argentinus, the shortfin squid, an open-ocean animal that migrates between Falkland and Argentinian waters, and Loligo gahi, the Patagonian squid, which is present in both Falkland and Argentinian waters but doesn't move much between the two.

Is it a shrub?  No one really knows. A fossilized specimen, a roughly elliptical shape with multiple lobes, totaling almost seven feet in length, was unveiled today at the North-Central Section 46th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Dayton, Ohio.

Around 450 million years ago, shallow seas covered the Cincinnati region and harbored one very large and now very mysterious organism. Despite its size, no one has ever found a fossil of this "monster" until its discovery by an citizen paleontologist, Ron Fine of Dayton, last year. 

Half-mile-sized objects have been seen punching through parts of Saturn's F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.  These mini-jets' trails in the rings fill in a missing link in our understanding of the curious behavior of the F ring. 

Scientists have known that relatively large objects like the moon Prometheus, 92 miles across, can create channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring but what happened to these snowballs after they were created was unclear.