You may have heard the news that Louisiana's governor recently signed an "Academic Freedom" bill, the first such bill to pass in a recent string of efforts to allow public school teachers to push non-scientific alternatives to evolution. (I previously wrote about Missouri's failed version.) All of these bills claim to promote academic freedom for public school teachers to teach the Intelligent Design movement's so-called evidence against evolution. But the concept of academic freedom in a high school curriculum makes no sense.

In the New Scientist story linked to above, Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education points out that "if you look at the American Association of University Professors' definition of academic freedom, it refers to the ability to do research and publish." The whole point of academic freedom is, like tenure, to protect independent scholars and scientists from having their work suppressed, manipulated, or managed by administrators or other people outside the research community who might want to pressure scholars to alter their conclusions or not research unfavorable topics.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine discovered that the activity of a specific family of nanometer-sized molecular motors called myosin-I is regulated by force. The motor puts tension on cellular springs that allow vibrations to be detected within the body.

This finely tuned regulation has important implications for understanding a wide variety of basic cellular processes, including hearing and balance and glucose uptake in response to insulin.

Myosin-I is a biological motor that uses the chemical energy made by cells to ferry proteins within cells and to generate force, powering the movement of molecular cargos in nearly all cells.

Imagine having three clocks in your house, each chiming at a different time.

Astronomers have found the equivalent of three out-of-sync "clocks" in the ancient open star cluster NGC 6791. The dilemma may fundamentally challenge the way astronomers estimate cluster ages, researchers said.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study the dimmest stars in the cluster, astronomers uncovered three different age groups. Two of the populations are burned-out stars called white dwarfs. One group of these low-wattage stellar remnants appears to be 6 billion years old, another appears to be 4 billion years old. The ages are out of sync with those of the cluster's normal stars, which are 8 billion years old.

Farm-raised tilapia, one of the most highly consumed fish in America, has very low levels of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids and, perhaps worse, very high levels of omega-6 fatty acids, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

The researchers say the combination could be a potentially dangerous food source for some patients with heart disease, arthritis, asthma and other allergic and auto-immune diseases that are particularly vulnerable to an “exaggerated inflammatory response.” Inflammation is known to cause damage to blood vessels, the heart, lung and joint tissues, skin, and the digestive tract.

Common genetic variations affecting nicotine receptors in the nervous system can significantly increase the chance that European Americans who begin smoking by age 17 will struggle with lifelong nicotine addiction, according to researchers at the University of Utah and their colleagues at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The study highlights the importance of public health efforts to reduce the number of youth who begin smoking.

These common gene variations - single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - are changes in a single unit of DNA. SNPs that are linked and inherited together are called a haplotype. The researchers found that one haplotype for the nicotine receptor put European American smokers at greater risk of heavy nicotine dependence as adults, but only if they began daily smoking before the age of 17. A second haplotype actually reduced the risk of adult heavy nicotine dependence for people who began smoking in their youth.

Indiana Jones isn't the only one who has great adventures, apparently proteins do also. Researchers have uncovered a a slippery tube that funnels proteins into a 'chamber of doom' where they are shredded and recycled into the building blocks of new proteins.

The tube is part of the 26S proteasome, an enzyme that acts as the cell’s protein garbage disposal. As described by researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the tube is a concentric stack of rings wrapped in molecular motors that speed the proteins toward the proteasome’s slicing and dicing core.

Bats, outnumbered only by rodents in number of species and thus the second largest group of mammals, are a remarkable evolutionary success story. Now they have gotten even more interesting. Researchers of the Leibniz-Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin (Germany) and Boston University (U.S.A.) have discovered a place that harbors the highest number of bat species ever recorded.

In just a few hectares of rainforest in the Amazon basin of eastern Ecuador, they have found more than 100 species of bats.

Dr. Katja Rex and colleagues captured bats at several biodiversity hotspots in the New World tropics, in the lowland rainforest of Costa Rica, the slopes of the Andes and a site in the Amazon rainforest of Eastern Ecuador, at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station located adjacent to the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve.

Like birds of a feather bikers in a peloton stick together. The formation used by competitive bikers, especially in the Tour De France, has to do with energy conservation and courtesy.

Peloton is a French word meaning “rolled up ball.” In English it is referred to as a “platoon.” It is crucial for cyclists who are expending a lot of energy for a significant amount of time to take advantage of this pack.

In the 2003 book “High-Tech Cycling” by Edmund R. Burke, he talks about the peloton as a huge source of energy in some cases reducing drag against wind up to 40 percent.

Like birds of a feather bikers in a peloton stick together. The formation used by competitive bikers, especially in the Tour De France, has to do with energy conservation and courtesy.

Peloton is a French word meaning “rolled up ball.” In English it is referred to as a “platoon.” It is crucial for cyclists who are expending a lot of energy for a significant amount of time to take advantage of this pack.

In the 2003 book “High-Tech Cycling” by Edmund R. Burke, he talks about the peloton as a huge source of energy in some cases reducing drag against wind up to 40 percent.

It looks almost scary with its one armed, three fingered, 1.45-meter-high, flexible physique. However the extent that it will rid its master’s house of any mess is anything but daunting.

Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, Germany have developed a new top-of-the-line robot they call “Care-O-bot® 3,” which is predicted to revolutionize modern housekeeping styles.

Maxine Clarke highlights a bit of recent controversy regarding Open Notebook Science that has been bouncing around the blogosphere and FriendFeedosphere. There are some who interpret the ongoing publication of our laboratory notebook as an expectation for the world to read it like a magazine. For someone who is not a collaborator or working in a related area that would make about as much sense as reading the phone book. Here is an example of how an Open Notebook should be used: