A 36-million-year-old penguin fossil from Peru shows the new giant penguin's feathers were reddish brown and grey, much different from the black tuxedoed look of living penguins - and it had scales. 

The new species, Inkayacu paracasensis, or Water King, was nearly five feet tall - twice the size of an Emperor penguin, the largest penguin today.   The fossil shows the flipper and feather shapes that make penguins such powerful swimmers evolved early, while the color patterning of living penguins is likely a much more recent innovation.

Proteins are the heavy lifters of cells, doing numerous tasks, but how the shape of a protein determines function remains one of the most important questions in the physics of biology.

Proteins are not the static, Lego-like objects you might see in an x-ray photograph in a textbook, they are made from long chains of amino acids scrunched into various blobs and a protein is always changing to slightly different structural arrangements due to thermal motion of its atoms. Even a modest-sized protein like myoglobin has an unimaginable number of possible arrangements of its atoms and each of these arrangements slightly changes its function.

Researchers have created artificial neural networks that can distinguish between different kinds of tea leaves - most people can't do that.   But they do it by analyzing the mineral content.

Their method makes it possible to distinguish between the five main tea varieties (white, green, black, Oolong and red) using chemometrics, a branch of chemistry that uses mathematics to extract useful information from data obtained in the laboratory.

Breast cancer affects over 10% of women in Europe, the UK and USA, making it one of the most common cancers. Large population studies such as the Women’s Health Initiative and the Million Women Study have shown that progestins, synthetic sex hormones used in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and in contraceptives, can increase the risk of breast cancers.

Medical researchers at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna have identified a key mechanism which allows these synthetic sex hormones to directly affect mammary cells.

A team of planet hunters has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times our mass) orbiting nearby star Gliese 581 at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's 'habitable zone', where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface.

If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered among the nearly 500 known extrasolar planets - and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.  To astronomers, a 'potentially habitable' planet is one that could sustain life, not necessarily one that humans would consider a nice place to live. Habitability depends on many factors, but liquid water and an atmosphere are among the most important. 

You are being manipulated by flowers.

A major blow to the free radical theory of aging, which has lead the research in aging for more than 50 years and fuels a multimillionaire anti-aging industry has just been published by Portuguese scientists from the University of Minho.

According to the theory, free radicals provoke oxidative damage and this is the cause of aging. The new work, however, shows that not only is possible to slow down aging in cells with high levels of oxidation but more, that a free radical (H2O2) is behind the high longevity seen with low caloric diets (a well known method to increase lifespan) turning upside down the way we see anti-aging therapy and research with major implications for the field.