Even after over 1,500 years frozen in Antarctic ice, moss can come back to life and continue to grow.

Writing in Current Biology, the team report that they observed moss regeneration after at least 1,530 years frozen in permafrost.  For the first time, this vital part of the ecosystem in both polar regions has been shown to have the ability to survive century to millennial scale ice ages and it is the first study to show such long-term survival in any plant; similar timescales have only been seen before in bacteria. Mosses are known to survive environmental extremes in the short-term with previous evidence confirming up to a 20 year timescale for survival. 

The antibiotic-resistant bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae sequence type 258 (ST258) is the predominant cause of human infections among bacteria classified as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which kill approximately 600 people annually in the United States and sicken thousands more.

Most CRE infections occur in hospitals and long-term care facilities among patients who are already weakened by unrelated disease or have undergone certain medical procedures.  

In Five Things Neil deGrasseTyson’s “Cosmos” Gets Wrong at The Federalist 

Life is just packed full of surprises.

You just never know when you'll get stuck in an elevator with the finalists for the new Victoria's Secret Catalog (all of whom just happen to be in estrus). 

You never know when you open your door if Ed McMahon will be standing there with a $1 million check from Publishers Clearing House.  (OK, this one you do know, since he's somewhat dead). Or a paroled member of the Manson Family. Or Paris Hilton with a parakeet on her head. 

So,  just when you think you've already seen the worst possible science paper in the entire history of multicellular life, life pulls the rug out from under you.

Please observe the following unusual locomotive behavior which begins at around 55 seconds into this video – when Groucho Marx starts to run.

Groucho is displaying a behaviour which scientists now call ‘Groucho Running’ *see note.

Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory.

Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang." Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Does BPA make you fat?

The tau lepton is a particle of very complex phenomenology. Although point-like as its lighter counterparts - the electron and the muon - the tau has a quite respectable mass, 1.77 GeV, which makes all the difference from the other charged leptons.

The tau was discovered in 1975 by Martin Perl at the SPEAR electron-positron collider. The acceptance of that observation was quite slow: the events found by Perl and his team were complicated because of the peculiar properties of the newfound particle. Perl had found an excess of events featuring an electron and a muon and an energy imbalance, which were hard to explain unless hypothesizing the creation of a pair of short-lived, heavy leptons.

This semester I’m teaching a graduate level course on “Hume Then and Now,” which aims at exploring some of the original writings by David Hume, particularly the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and contemporary philosophical treatments of Humean themes, such as induction, epistemic justification, and causality.

New evidence gathered by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury solves an apparent enigma about Mercury's evolution. 

The data indicate the tiny planet closest to the sun, only slightly larger than earth's moon, has shrunk up to 7 kilometers in radius over the past 4 billion years, much more than earlier estimates. Older images of surface features indicated that, despite cooling over its lifetime, the rocky planet had barely shrunk at all. But modeling of the planet's formation and aging could not explain that finding.