Alan Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer collect snow-depth data for ESA's CryoSat-2 mission. They're seasoned polar explorers so they are used to dealing with physically demanding and downright harsh conditions but what they encountered during their three and a half-month expedition from Russia to Greenland via the North Pole was dangerous even for them.

They didn't expect that the Lincoln Sea in the Arctic Ocean, the very ice they were on, would begin to disintegrate. Aside from the dangerous conditions they also had to circumnavigate the ice-free water leads.

Scientists at University College Cork have discovered that probiotic bacteria can protect against bacterial infection. The work was carried out in the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) in UCC.

The APC, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, was set up investigate the beneficial roles of the bacteria found in the gastro-intestine of healthy humans.

The research group examined a range of beneficial bacteria and found one specific probiotic bacterium (Lactobacillus salivarius UCC118) which was able to kill Listeria monocytogenes, an often lethal pathogen in pregnant women. The probiotic kills the pathogen by producing an antibiotic-like compound called a bacteriocin.

Engineers at Purdue University are developing robots able to make "educated guesses" about what lies ahead as they traverse unfamiliar surroundings, reducing the amount of time it takes to successfully navigate those environments.

The method works by using a new software algorithm that enables a robot to create partial maps as it travels through an environment for the first time. The robot refers to this partial map to predict what lies ahead.

The more repetitive the environment, the more accurate the prediction and the easier it is for the robot to successfully navigate, said C.S.

ScientificBlogging.com Featured Columnist Jane Poynter has written a book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 , discussing her experiences inside the legendary long-term science experiment.

Using a new computational method called NetworKIN, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital, MIT and EMBL can now use biological networks to better identify relationships between molecules, including regulation of protein networks that will ultimately help to target human disease.

“Our method works a bit like getting a recommendation from Amazon,” says Dr. Peer Bork, group leader at EMBL. “The fact that certain books have been bought by the same customers tells you that they have something in common. In the same way biological networks tell us about shared features between different proteins. These help us predicting which kinases are likely to act on them.”

Samuel Isaac Weissman, a professor and chemist who helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, has died, his wife said Friday. He was 94.

Weissman died Tuesday in St. Louis. His wife, Jane Loevinger, said a cause of death was not known.

A specimen of the Wollemi pine, an Australian conifer and one of the world's oldest tree species, has been donated to Bergianska Garden at Stockholm University in Sweden.

The Wollemi was discovered on September 10, 1994, in an isolated valley in Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, about 150 km northwest of Sydney. It is estimated to be about 200 million years old, from earth's Jurassic Period, so it was around even before the Australian continent was formed.

Humans have yet to see Earth's center, as did the characters in Jules Verne's science fiction classic, "Journey to the Center of the Earth." But a new NASA study proposes a novel technique to pinpoint more precisely the location of Earth's center of mass and how it moves through space.

Knowing the location of the center of mass, determined using measurements from sites on Earth's surface, is important because it provides the reference frame through which scientists determine the relative motions of positions on Earth's surface, in its atmosphere and in space.

Rare, previously undetectable drug-resistant forms of HIV have been identified by Yale School of Medicine researcher Michael Kozal, M.D., using an innovative genome sequencing technology that quickly detects rare viral mutations.

Kozal, associate professor of medicine at Yale and senior author of the retrospective study that used samples from an earlier clinical trial, presented the findings today at the 16th International HIV Drug Resistance Workshop in Barbados. “We found that the fraction of HIV patients that harbored resistance mutations is at least twice as high as previously thought,” said Kozal, who also directs the HIV Program at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System.

A tiny single-celled organism that plays a key role in the carbon cycle of cold-water oceans may be a lot smarter than scientists had suspected.

Researchers report the first evidence that a common species of saltwater algae – also known as phytoplankton – can change form to protect itself against attack by predators that have very different feeding habits. To boost its survival chances, Phaeocystis globosa will enhance or suppress the formation of colonies based on whether nearby grazers prefer eating large or small particles.