An international research effort has resulted in an integrated physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome, which could lead to higher yields, improved pest- and disease-resistance and enhanced nutritional value of crops.

If suffer from arachnophobia, fear or spiders, you know that rationality does not enter into it. Imagining a huge and hairy tarantula crawling on your arm in a therapist’s office is not less scary than coming out of the shower and seeing a tiny spider.

Why are phobias so hard to shake? It's not as easy as extinguishing the fear response. Instead of trying to erase the memory of the fear provoking stimuli,  creating new, competitive memory traces may be the solution. 

People love Top 10 Lists.  So a ranking system of the ten most important phytopathogenic fungi on a scientific and economic level should be a big hit. If you don't want to spend five more minutes reading, the rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe oryzae) is at the top of the list.

The results were tabulated by a survey of 495 international researchers about the most important phytopathogenic fungi. Each researcher chose three that they thought to be most significant and the most voted then formed the list.

The link between mathematics and music has always been there - our ears hear in frequencies and even before those frequencies were known in physics terms, ancient philosopher-scientists had determined that the language of math linked areas as remote as planetary motion and harmony. "There is music in the spacing of the spheres," wrote Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans didn't have irrational numbers, negative numbers or even a zero but they didn't need those for their kind of symbolism.

Researchers from Germany and Switzerland did an analysis on sediment cores from the Black Sea and concluded that, for a brief period during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed south instead of north. And that wasn't the worst thing going on around the same time.

41,000 years ago, say the researchers, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occurred. Along with the Black Sea sediment cores, they look at other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, and say it proves that this polarity reversal was a global event. 

Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud was close enough to be seen by the naked eye when its light first reached Earth in February of 1987.  During the explosion's peak, fingerprints of elements from oxygen to calcium were detected, representing the outer layers of the ejecta and soon after, signatures of the material synthesized in the inner layers could be seen in the radioactive decay of nickel-56 to cobalt-56, and its subsequent decay to iron-56. 

After more than 1000 hours of observation by Integral, high-energy X-rays from radioactive titanium-44 in supernova remnant 1987A have been detected for the first time. The radioactive decay has likely been powering the glowing remnant around the exploded star for the last 20 years.