Oceans cover 70 percent of the earth's surface and compared to terrestrial ecosystems, the animal and plant species concealed under water have been researched relatively little.  

An international collaborative project recorded the times, places and concentrations of oceanic plankton occurrences worldwide and the data have been collected in a global atlas that covers organisms from bacteria to krill.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has captured the first ever image of the snow line in an infant solar system.

Say what?

On our planet, snow lines form at high altitudes where falling temperatures turn the moisture in the air into snow. This line is clearly visible on a mountain, where the snow-capped summit ends and the rocky face begins. The snow lines around young stars form in a similar way, in the distant, colder reaches of the dusty discs from which solar systems form.

Snap Circuits is an educational toy that teaches electronics with solderless snap-together electronic components. Each component has the schematic symbol and a label printed on its plastic case that is color coded for easy identification. They snap together with ordinary clothing snaps. The components also snap onto a 10 X 7 plastic base grid somewhat analogous to a solderless breadboard. There are several Snap Circuits kits that range from a few simple circuits to the largest kit that includes 750 electronic projects.

Gleaning from the natural process of X chromosome inactivation, scientists recently discovered a way to “turn off” the extra copy of chromosome 21 in Down syndrome, a strategy that might one day cure this disorder.

Rapid coastal subsidence in the central Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (Bangladesh) since the 17th century has been deduced from submerged salt-producing kilns.

NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars, which first landed inside the Gale Crater on Aug. 6th, 2012, may provide clues as to how the red planet lost its original atmosphere, which scientists believe was much thicker than the one left today.

Today I am quite happy to report of a new groundbreaking result from the CMS collaboration at the CERN LHC - the experiment to which I devote 100% of my research time. We published overnight a report on the Cornell arxiv, and will present this week at the EPS conference in Stockholm, of the observation of B_s meson decays to muon pairs, an exceedingly rare process which is of extreme importance for the searches of new physics beyond the standard model. And in so doing, CMS now leads this race, with better results than LHCb and ATLAS. (UPDATE: but see below, at the bottom of the article).

Heart tissue sustains irreparable damage in the wake of a heart attack but because cells in the heart cannot multiply and the cardiac muscle contains few stem cells, the tissue is unable to repair itself — it becomes fibrotic and cannot contract properly.

The search is on for innovative methods to restore heart function and so scientists have been exploring cardiac "patches" that could be transplanted into the body to replace damaged heart tissue. 

If a physics department has no women, does that mean there is hiring discrimination?

Only if your job in sociology is to find discrimination. Simple statistics shows that is not true or there would be claims of discrimination in psychology, where lots of departments have no men. Yet when it comes to gender equality advocates, physics is always mentioned and psychology never is.

A new analysis by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center debunks the claim that the existence of all-male departments is evidence of hiring bias. Labor statistics have backed that up; not only are women hired equally for faculty and tenure jobs in science academia, they are over-hired based on their representation. 

Everything in moderation, goes an old saying, and it is true that too much alcohol can be bad for you in lots of ways.  But teetotalers, those who abstain from alcohol completely, aren't extending their lives either.

As a class, people who don't drink at all have a higher mortality risk than light drinkers. But nondrinkers are a diverse bunch, and the reasons people have for abstaining affects their individual mortality risk, in some cases lowering it on par with the risk for light drinkers, according to a University of Colorado analysis.