Today the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Collaboration announced that they have measured the scale of the universe to an accuracy of one percent.   

The clymene dolphin is a small and sleek marine mammal living in the Atlantic Ocean. A new study has found this dolphin is a rarity in mammals - a genetic hybrid that is closely related to spinner and striped dolphins.

The classification of the clymene dolphin has been a longstanding challenge to taxonomists, who initially considered it to be a subspecies of the spinner dolphin. Then in 1981, thorough morphological analyses established it as a recognized distinct species.

In a future where the public will be paying for health care, the patience for preventable diseases, like those related to smoking and overeating, is dwindling.

But current weight loss messages and the stereotyping in the media -  that characterize overweight individuals as lazy, weak-willed, self-indulgent and contributing to rising health care costs — may be tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Designed to encourage weight loss, they may actually have the opposite effect, according to U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor Brenda Major.

We hear a lot about carbon storage and the impact on the atmosphere if CO2 is release during warming, but how does that work?

Carbon is not evenly distributed in soil, instead the kinds of carbon hot spots that matter are found on about 20 percent of mineral surfaces, according to a new paper. Studies have established that carbon binds to tiny mineral particles and in a new paper researchers show that the surface of the minerals plays just as important a role as their size.

"The carbon binds to minerals that are just a few thousandths of a millimeter in size – and it accumulates there almost exclusively on rough and angular surfaces," explains Prof. Ingrid Kögel-Knabner,
Technische Universitaet Muenchen

Dinosaur fossils are exceptionally rare in the Arabian Peninsula but researchers have uncovered the first record of dinosaurs from Arabia itself.

What is now dry desert was once a beach littered with the bones and teeth of ancient marine reptiles and dinosaurs. A string of vertebrae from the tail of a huge "Brontosaurus-like" sauropod, together with some shed teeth from a carnivorous theropod represent the first formally identified dinosaur fossils from Arabia, and were found in the north-western part of the dictatorship run by the Al-Saud family, along the coast of the Red Sea.

Welcome to the first big solar flare of 2014.

The sun emitted a significant solar flare peaking at 1:32 p.m. EST on Jan.7, 2014. This is the first significant flare of 2014 and follows on the heels of mid-level flare earlier in the day. Each flare was centered over a different area of a large sunspot group currently situated at the center of the sun, about half way through its 14-day journey across the front of the disk along with the rotation of the sun.  

African-Americans having a shorter life expectancy and a greater likelihood of suffering from aging-related illnesses at younger ages compared to European-Americans. 

A new paper claims that it may be racism impacting aging - at the cellular level. The correlation is that the epidemiologists, doing their part to turn their field into sociology, found signs of accelerated aging in African-American men who who had internalized anti-African-American attitudes or reported high levels of racial discrimination.

There are lots of female scientists in America, women get more Ph.D.s than men, yet in academia they also tend to leave more often because, the claim goes, academia lacks the potential for advancement and the family-friendly policies that the corporate world has.