Satellite measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years and suggest that the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.

The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats.

Tumors mimic key features of lymph nodes in order to create a tolerant microenviroment and escape attack from the immune system, say researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The discovery, published in Science underscores the role of the lymphatic system in cancer and may open up new possibilities for cancer treatment.

Although the internet has given anybody with a computer access to a seemingly limitless amount of information, it has also had a profound effect on clinical medicine--and not necessarily a good one.

Doctor's writing in the New England Journal of Medicine say that patients are often exposed to incorrect or poorly interpreted information on the internet that is fundamentally changing the "the core relationship between doctor and patient."

While applauding the ability of patients to receive test results and communicate with their clinicians electronically – and to search for disease symptoms at numerous web sites – the authors suggest it is a journey no patient should undertake alone.

An international team of astronomers has confirmed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating after looking at new data from the largest-ever survey conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope. The results of the research will appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Researchers studied more than 446,000 galaxies to map the matter distribution and the expansion history of the universe. They were able to observe precisely how dark matter evolved in the universe and to reconstruct a three-dimensional map of the dark matter and use this to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

By changing the material medium through which x-rays pass, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used laser light to control x-ray beams.

As a new generation of powerful light sources comes online, intense x-ray beams may be able to control matter directly and allow one beam of x-rays to control another, the new Nature Physics study suggests.

Using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source femtosecond spectroscopy beamline 6.0.2, researchers sent ultrashort pulses of laser light and higher-frequency x-rays together through a gas cell filled with pressurized neon. Excited by the laser pulses, the gas, which normally absorbs x-rays, became transparent to the x-ray pulses during their quick passage.

Paleontologists have discovered a new bird fossil in northeast China that provides more evidence for a specialized group of small birds that diversified during the Early Cretaceous between about 130 and 120 million years ago.

The discovery also suggests that scientists have only tapped a small proportion of the birds and dinosaurs that were living at that time.

The new bird, named “Longicrusavis houi,” belongs to a group of birds known as ornithuromorphs (Ornithuromorpha), which are rare in rocks of this age. Ornithuromorphs are more closely related to modern birds than are most of the other birds from the Jehol Biota.

Not only do evil fast food companies make us fat and tempt our children with deceptive advertising, they also make us impatient, according to a new study in Psychological Science.

In fact, mere exposure to fast food and related symbols can make us impatient, increasing preference for time saving products, and reducing willingness to save, the study found.

Now that the latest battle in the invertebrate wars seems to have died down a bit (victors inconclusive, of course), I can post a list of cool things about cephalopods that have put them in the news lately, without it necessarily having to serve as ammunition. (<---WOW, that was the most awkward sentence ever, but guess who DOES NOT CARE, because she has been locked in a basement for a week writing her dissertation! HI!)

1. They used to rule the world. As I'm sure Dr. Fuchs discussed in his lecture:

Ignacio Ellacuria wrote,"with Mons. Romero God is past for El Salvador".

Like about four years ago, the name of Grigoriy Yakovlevich (Grisha) Perelman is again in the mass-media headlines all around the world.

Grisha is a prominent mathematician, who was able to solve one of the most perplexed mathematical problems of the last two centuries: he had managed to prove the Poincaré conjecture.

In 2006 he was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, but had voluntarily and expressly refused to accept it.
Most recently, he has been awarded the not less prestigious Clay Millenium Prize, but is expected to reject this award as well.