Bacteriorhodopsin found in the membranes of ancient microorganisms in desert salt flats have been used generate environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory.

Cancer occurs most often in adults because it often takes decades of accumulating genetic errors for a tumor to develop - pediatric tumors are another issue.

Recently, researchers may have found a missing piece of the pediatric cancer puzzle; a mechanism behind the early development of some pediatric solid tumors.

In healthy cells, a checkpoint prompts the cell to repair damaged DNA before it replicates. Many researchers believe that cancer cells flourish when these checkpoints are skipped or inhibited, as the mutated cells can survive and rapidly reproduce. A growing collection of damaged cells can lead to the solid tumors of many childhood cancers, such as those of rhabdomyosarcoma, neuroblastoma and osteosarcoma.

Gingivae is soft tissue that serves as a biological barrier to cover the oral cavity side of the maxilla and mandible. Recently, the gingivae were identified as containing mesenchymal stem cells (GMSCs). However, it is unknown whether the GMSCs are derived from cranial neural crest cells (CNCC) or the mesoderm. 

Oceans cover 70 percent of the earth's surface and compared to terrestrial ecosystems, the animal and plant species concealed under water have been researched relatively little.  

An international collaborative project recorded the times, places and concentrations of oceanic plankton occurrences worldwide and the data have been collected in a global atlas that covers organisms from bacteria to krill.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has captured the first ever image of the snow line in an infant solar system.

Say what?

On our planet, snow lines form at high altitudes where falling temperatures turn the moisture in the air into snow. This line is clearly visible on a mountain, where the snow-capped summit ends and the rocky face begins. The snow lines around young stars form in a similar way, in the distant, colder reaches of the dusty discs from which solar systems form.

Gleaning from the natural process of X chromosome inactivation, scientists recently discovered a way to “turn off” the extra copy of chromosome 21 in Down syndrome, a strategy that might one day cure this disorder.

Rapid coastal subsidence in the central Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (Bangladesh) since the 17th century has been deduced from submerged salt-producing kilns.

If a physics department has no women, does that mean there is hiring discrimination?

Only if your job in sociology is to find discrimination. Simple statistics shows that is not true or there would be claims of discrimination in psychology, where lots of departments have no men. Yet when it comes to gender equality advocates, physics is always mentioned and psychology never is.

A new analysis by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center debunks the claim that the existence of all-male departments is evidence of hiring bias. Labor statistics have backed that up; not only are women hired equally for faculty and tenure jobs in science academia, they are over-hired based on their representation.