A study today highlighted a new therapeutic technique to repair and rebuild muscle for sufferers of degenerative muscle disorders. The therapy brings together two existing techniques for muscle repair, cell transplantation and tissue engineering - mesoangioblast stem cells delivered via a hydrogel cell-carrier matrix.

Some people take risks with investments while others on safety with their money and in other business activities. Researchers have looked at the attitudes towards risk in a group of 56 subjects and found that in people who preferred safety, certain regions of the brain show a higher level of activation when they are confronted with quite unforeseeable situations.  

The top quark is the heaviest of the six known hadron constituents, discovered at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in 1995.  Because of its quite large mass -over forty times more than the second-heaviest bottom quark- and because of a few additional interesting properties, the top quark has stimulated in the past two decades a large amount of theoretical work, well matched to the Tevatron investigations.

In fact, one of the explicit goals of the CDF and DZERO experiments for Run II of the Tevatron, which lasted from 2002 to 2010, was to study extensively the top quark both as a standard model object, subjected as it is to electroweak interactions which can be studied and compared to predictions, and as a portal to new physics of various kinds.

This semester I’ve been running a graduate level seminar at the City University of New York, on the difference between philosophy of science and science studies. The latter is a broad and somewhat vaguely defined term that includes (certain kinds of) sociology of science, postmodern criticism of science, and feminist epistemology. It’s the stuff of the (in)famous science wars of the 1990s (think Sokal affair, or perhaps this most recent disgraceful episode).

And now the news from Alpha Centauri…(Oh, I’ve waited for so long to utter those words! News. From Alpha Centauri. Wow!)

Marketing people follow predictable patterns; in order to sell something it either needs to scare people or make them feel good.  "This ain't your father's" X is a timeless perceptual classic, meaning it is not old-fashioned and conservative and boring like parents.

Clostridium acetobutylicum became popular when the chemist Chaim Weizmann first used the bacterium to ferment the solvent acetone and the alcohols butanol and ethanol, collectively known as “ABE” products, from starch - he wanted to create synthetic rubber and during World War I the process was used by the British to ferment acetone for the production of cordite, the explosive propellant that replaced gunpowder in bullets and artillery shells.

I feel stuck, stuck in the continued reflection of what DSM labels mean to individuals and how they conceive their identities. Perhaps this is because so much of what I read on the internet in our online community is about identity and labels. It seems many of us are focused on what it means to be autistic and who controls the right to label and define.

Mountain glaciers respond to climate change by rapidly advancing or receding as global temperatures have spiked upward and downward numerous times throughout geological history. Those changes in glacier extent control hydrology, sediment transport, and deposition in rivers downstream. 

The sedimentary record in glaciated catchments therefore is an important archive with that can help unravel past climate changes but, unlike rivers, whose flow is controlled entirely by land surface topography, glaciers are able to flow uphill and across ridgelines - a process called "transfluence." Glacier advance and recession can result in drainage capture by transfluent ice flow, and so change catchment drainage areas and hydrological budgets. 

How some dahlias, white, yellow, red or purple, get their color is well known, but the  molecular mechanism behind the black dahlia has been a mystery. A new study shows that the distinctive black-red coloring is based on an increased accumulation of anthocyanins as a result of drastically reduced concentrations of flavones.

Dahlia variabilis hort. is a popular garden flower. Continuous dahlia breeding worldwide has led to the availability of a huge number of cultivars, 20,000 varieties, many of them showing red hues. However, black hues of dahlia flowers occur rarely, in comparison.