Exposure to ultraviolet light can contribute to skin cancer and, despite increased education about sunscreens, farmers, construction workers and others who spend long hours exposed to sunlight are among those most at risk. Plus, sunscreens are not alway effective for these high-risk people because they have to be re-applied frequently.

Professor Chandradhar Dwivedi, head of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department in the College of Pharmacy at South Dakota State University, says their group is working with new types of molecules that will not only boost sunscreen protection but even reverse sun damage. Dwivedi said the work could be commercialized within 10 years.

Here’s a look at SDSU’s research of skin product components:

A team of European scientists working with COROT have discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star slightly more massive than the Sun. After just 555 days in orbit, the mission has now observed more than 50 000 stars and is adding significantly to our knowledge of the fundamental workings of stars.

The latest discovery, COROT-exo-4b is an exoplanet of about the same size as Jupiter. It takes 9.2 days to orbit its star, the longest period for any transiting exoplanet ever found.

Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have disproved a long-standing clinical belief that the hepatitis C virus slows or stunts the immune system's ability to restore itself after HIV patients are treated with a combination of drugs known as the "cocktail."

Hepatitis C (HCV) infection is more serious in HIV-infected people, leading to rapid liver damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Intravenous drug use is a main method of contraction for both HIV and HCV and 50 to 90 percent of HIV-infected drug users are also infected with HCV.

Officials from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and FAU’s Center for Ocean Energy Technology (COET) in the College of Engineering and Computer Science accompanied Florida Governor Charlie Crist on a recent visit to several universities and organizations in the United Kingdom to continue discussions, exchange information and formalize agreements in areas of clean ocean energy, environmental issues and climate change.

Last year, Florida and the UK signed a partnership agreement on global climate change, physically tying one to the other by the Gulf Stream, that massive ocean current which is of critical importance to the present climate and quality of life affecting each partner.

If the drinker paradox states that in any pub there is a customer such that, if he or she drinks, everybody in the pub drinks and the diamond-water paradox states that water is more useful than diamonds, yet is a lot cheaper , then the French paradox that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease despite a diet relatively rich in saturated fats, must certainly be true.

The French paradox became popular on an episode of 60 minutes in 1991 with the incorporation of research supporting, red wine as the reason for the decrease in heart disease. Shortly after the show aired wine sales went up 44 percent.

According to Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, "All free-living organisms host one or more parasites." This can be taken two ways, both of them generally true: a) that each individual multicellular organism hosts at least one individual parasite within its body, and b) that each free-living species plays host to at least one species of parasite that attacks it exclusively. Consider this second point for a moment. For each free living species there is one or more (usually several more) parasite species -- that is, as a category (polyphyletic, obviously), parasites may very well be the most diverse types of organisms on the planet.

Somewhere, people got the idea that girls were not as good at math as boys and that was a cultural issue - discrimination on one side or favoritism on the other - and it had to be fixed, usually with legislation and money for social activists.

Is there any truth to it?

After sifting through mountains of data, including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act, a team of scientists reporting in Science says the answer is 'no.' Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers were able to witness for the first time the appearance of a shell of dusty gas around a star that had just erupted and follow its evolution for more than 100 days. This provided the astronomers with a new way to estimate the distance of this object and obtain invaluable information on the operating mode of stellar vampires, dense stars that suck material from a companion.

Although novae were first thought to be new stars appearing in the sky, hence their Latin name, they are now understood as signaling the brightening of a small, dense star. Novae occur in double star systems comprising a white dwarf - the end product of a solar-like star - and, generally, a low-mass normal star - a red dwarf. The two stars are so close together that the red dwarf cannot hold itself together and loses mass to its companion. Occasionally, the shell of matter that has fallen onto the ingesting star becomes unstable, leading to a thermonuclear explosion which makes the system brighter.

A new discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage akin to rust in some metals, and implies science might eventually halt or even reverse the ravages of age.

Specific genetic instructions drive aging in worms, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers examined the regulation of aging in C. elegans, a millimeter-long nematode worm whose simple body and small number of genes make it a useful tool for biologists. The worms age rapidly: their maximum life span is about two weeks.