Was Judgment Day at hand? At noon, it was black as night, there was lunch by candle light, the night birds came out to sing while flowers folded their petals and the animals behaved strangely. They called it 'New England's Dark Day' and it's been a mystery for almost 230 years.

The mystery has been solved, according to researchers at the University of Missouri, who say evidence from tree rings reveals massive wildfires as the likely cause, one of several theories proposed after the event but previously dismissed as 'simple and absurd.'

Limited ability for long-distance communication prevented colonists from knowing the cause of the darkness.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have taken a page from sports physiology and developed a low-cost optical sensor to measure the force with which tiny, migrating somatic cells push themselves away from an underlying surface. Force analysis devices like these could help to identify specific cell types more reliably than using a microscope or other conventional methods.

The sensor consists of a smooth surface that is studded with 250,000 tiny plastic columns measuring only five microns in diameter, rather like a fakir’s bed of nails. These columns are made of elastic polyurethane plastic. When a cell glides across them, it bends them very slightly sideways. This deflection is registered by a digital camera and analyzed by a special software program.

The researchers working with project manager Dr. Norbert Danz of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena have already shown that their ‘Cellforce’ sensor works. It will be the task of initial biological tests to show how different cell types behave.

Biology remains a wide-open field because it has accomplished a lot but still has a long way to go. The dominant view in cellular behavior, for example, has been that it is largely chemistry-driven but there is increasing recognition that the mechanical aspects are vital to our understanding also.

Developing fundamental math and mechanics models to explain life processes like embryo development, cellular migration and growth could open doors to a new frontier in biology, say a group of researchers.

"A lot of what the cell does is mechanical. It needs to move things around. It migrates," says Krishna Garikipati, an associate professor in the U-M Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics.

Researchers from Iowa State University have identified a factor that promotes the development of antibiotic resistance in a bacterial pathogen. The study explains that Mfd, a protein involved in DNA transcription and repair, plays an important role in the development of fluoroquinolone resistance in Campylobacter, a bacterial pathogen commonly associated with food poisoning in humans.

Development of antibiotic resistance in Campylobacter, especially to fluoroquinolone (a broad-spectrum antimicrobial), compromises clinical therapy and poses a public health threat. Previous studies have revealed that Campylobacter is highly mutable to antibiotic treatment and the number of fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter is greatly increased in many regions of the world. But it has not been clear why Campylobacter is able to mutate at such a high frequency.

TreePeople, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit corporation that does not seem to be one of the groups filing lawsuits every time anyone recommended responsible forest management that would have prevented the numerous wildfires that have ravaged southern California in recent years, today announced that it has received a $1 million grant from The Boeing Company to launch a comprehensive California Wildfire Restoration Initiative in response to the numerous wildfires that have ravaged southern California in recent years.

The grant fulfills a pledge Boeing made in the wake of last year’s wildfires to contribute $1 million toward rebuilding efforts in the region.

Scientists have been trying to understand how and when we gain or lose fat cells, and now a paper in this week's issue of Nature reports that nuclear bombs are the key to solving this problem.

To understand how our bodies regulate our weight, researchers are interested in knowing how the number of fat cells changes over our lifetime - do we stop making more fat cells after adolescence? Do we keep the same fat cells all of our adult lives, or do some die off and get replaced by new ones? The typical way to study the birth and death of cells in live animals is to use radioactive tracers that label DNA, but these experiments are too toxic to try in humans. It turns out though, that the US and Soviet militaries did the experiment for us, with above-ground nuclear bomb tests in the late 1950's, tests which spewed large amounts of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. That radioactive carbon is now in our DNA (at least for those of us alive during the cold war), and it provides a convenient "manufactured on" date for our long-lived fat cells.

I've written this post to address some of the issues raised in the comments to my first post on the evolution versus creationism debate.  

(1) A major reason that Biblical creationism thrives in certain parts of America is because -- unlike every other highly developed country in the world -- we do not have a national science curriculum.  America has a very strong tradition of "home rule" which means that state and local school boards can choose, if they wish, to exclude any discussion of evolutionary mechanisms in biology classes.  (I was elected to my own local school board in Princeton, NJ, where the teaching of evolution has never been disputed.)  Children who go to public schools (or Catholic schools) in western Europe and Asia learn biology (life sciences) in a complete sense, which incorporates evolutionary thinking at every level of analysis from genes to cells to whole organisms, populations, and ecosystems.  These educated children have opportunities to pursue scientific careers that creationists don't even know exist.  This is why the exclusion of 50% of America's children from knowing about evolution diminishes our country's competitiveness.

(2) To "do" science of any kind, you must learn what has been done previously and what the state of the field is at the present time. I am not ashamed of the fact that I needed to take three years of college courses in physics and math (16 courses in all) before I was able to understand quantum mechanics and general relativity to a degree where I could actually use these concepts to investigate unknowns. However, even with a Master's degree in physics (I switched to biophysics for my Ph.D.), I don't have the capacity to critique modern ideas like string theory -- but I am not ashamed of this either.  Unfortunately for students today, you can't even begin to take in-depth courses in modern molecular biology without first completing college-level courses in physics, chemistry (organic and inorganic), and math.  Then you'll need to study formal genetics, population genetics, biochemistry, cell biology etc. before you can truly understand the modern synthesis of evolution-genetics-developmental biology that is driving the biomedical enterprise.   This is not an insult against anyone's beliefs or knowledge.  It is simply a fact of the depth and breadth of modern science.

Mathematicians and astrophysicists recently discovered that work on the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and gravitational lensing had a common answer.

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (FTA), proofs of which go back to the 18th century, is a bedrock mathematical truth, elegant in its simplicity: Every complex polynomial of degree n has n roots in the complex numbers.

In the 1990s, Terry Sheil-Small and Alan Wilmshurst explored the question of extending the FTA to harmonic polynomials. In a surprising twist in 2001, Khavinson, together with G. Swiatek, applied methods from complex dynamics to settle one of the cases of Wilmshurst's conjecture, showing that for a certain class of harmonic polynomials, the number of zeros is at most 3n - 2, where n is the degree of the polynomial.

Until recently, the debate about intelligence had little in the way of data, with proponents of genetic factors in IQ squared off against proponents of environmental factors without any gaining much ground.

But new research, led by Swiss postdoctoral fellows Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, working at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, suggests that at least one aspect of a person's IQ can be improved by training a certain type of memory.

Most IQ tests attempt to measure two types of intelligence--crystallized and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence draws on existing skills, knowledge and experiences to solve problems by accessing information from long-term memory.

The last time you had a cappuccino, did you think 'I bet I can learn something about type-I superconductors here?' Well, a team of Ames Laboratory physicists did and have found that the bubble-like arrangement of magnetic domains in superconducting lead exhibits patterns that are very similar to everyday froths like soap foam or frothed milk on a fancy coffee.

The similarities between the polygonal-shaped patterns in conventional foams and "suprafroths," the patterns created by a magnetic field in a superconductor, establish suprafroths as a model system for the study of froths.

Ruslan Prozorov, Ames Laboratory physicist and primary investigator, discovered the suprafroth pattern last year, seeing an unexpected foam-like design when he applied a magnetic field to a lead sample in a magneto-optics system. Since the term "superfroth" was already in use for an unrelated product, Prozorov coined "suprafroths" in a nod to history: in the 1930s, superconductors were called "supraconductors."