Researchers from George Washington University and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology have discovered a new species of Jurassic theropod dinosaur called Haplocheirus sollers in Xinjiang, China. The team says the discovery illustrates how one family of dinosaurs called Alvarezsauridae came to look like birds independent of birds.

WARNING!  Very bad joke alert.  Please engage brain before reading further.

Scoop!  Newsflash!  No Science At IPCC!

Following hot on the heels of recent news about emails, glaciers and rainforests comes a new discovery that will warm the hearts of climate change deniers everywhere.  It is indisputable fact that the IPCC does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.

Since when has systems biology been a synonym for genomics?

This is from a Perspective piece in the Oct. 2 issue of Science:

The relative value of discovery aimed at hypothesis generation versus hypothesis testing has been debated. High-profile journals publish systems biology studies, including the human genome sequence, but most papers focus on hypothesis-driven investigations.

It's not hard to find scare stories about cell phones and brain cancer. On the other hand, numerous randomized, double-blind studies have debunked extreme claims of negative health effects of EMF exposure.

So what should you believe? Is the cell phone industry, like the tobacco industry in the past, covering up evidence for the harmful effects of cells phones?

I have been known to admit that I fell in love with cephalopods because they are the closest things to aliens coexisting with us on our home planet. (I love aliens.) Clearly I am not the only person to come to this conclusion:

The giant Humboldt squid could be some sort of alien species from a 1980s science fiction film. Flashing white and red like a Klingon stealth cloak, they blanket an area to attack and devour any creature they can, including each other. They employ long tentacles covered with suckers and claw-like "teeth" to grasp their prey and bring it in to a large, hard black beak, which resembles that of a demon macaw.

The scientific community may agree that anthropogenic global warming poses a real threat, but the general public isn't all that worried about the changing climate. Public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008, according to the results of a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.

The survey found that Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease. The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent. The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.

According to a new study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, parents who try to teach responsible drinking to their children by letting them drink at home may be setting their teens up for all kinds of alcohol related problems later in life.

The study included 428 families with two children between the ages of 13 and 15. Parents and teens completed questionnaires on drinking habits at the outset and again one and two years later.

Based on new radiocarbon dating evidence for the Late Aurignacian of Portugal, an archaeological culture unquestionably associated with modern humans,  an international team of researchers claims that the last Neanderthals in Europe died out approximately 37,000 years ago.

The new paper, published in PLoS ONE builds on earlier research which proposed that, south of the Cantabro-Pyrenean mountain chain, Neanderthals survived for several millennia after being replaced or assimilated by anatomically modern humans everywhere else in Europe.

A new study in Biological Chemistry suggests that Vitamin D, readily available in supplements or cod liver oil, may counter the effects of Crohn's disease.

Researchers from McGill University and the Université de Montréal found that Vitamin D acts directly on the beta defensin 2 gene, which encodes an antimicrobial peptide, and the NOD2 gene that alerts cells to the presence of invading microbes. Both Beta-defensin and NOD2 have been linked to Crohn's disease. If NOD2 is deficient or defective, it cannot combat invaders in the intestinal tract.