Variations in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels may be closely linked to the evolution of life, with feedbacks between uni- and multicellular life and oxygen, say scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London and from The Field Museum in Chicago.    Writing in Nature Geoscience, they say over the past 400 million years, the level of oxygen has varied considerably from the 21% value we have today and the amount of charcoal preserved in ancient peat bogs, now coal, gives a measure of how much oxygen there was in the past.

Researchers have reported the creation of pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory, just by putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene.

Graphene is a form of carbon that consists of a single layer of carbon atoms.  A carbon atom has four valence electrons.   In graphene (and in graphite, a stack of graphene layers), three electrons bond in a plane with their neighbors to form a strong hexagonal pattern, like chicken-wire. The fourth electron sticks up out of the plane and is free to hop from one atom to the next. The latter pi-bond electrons act as if they have no mass at all, like photons. They can move at almost one percent of the speed of light.

What if assumptions of bias factored into test results to overcome social or cultural bias that prevents some people from achieving high test scores turned out to be flawed?

That's a messy sentence, right?   Confusing sentences like that are what happens when 40 years of accepted practice in using  tools to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. If it holds up, this finding from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business challenges basically throws out reliance on those exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions.

A new corticosteroid hormone in the sea lamprey, an eel-like fish and one of the earliest vertebrates dating back 500 million years, may shed light on the evolution of steroid hormones.

Principal investigator and lead author David Close of the University of British Columbia's Department of Zoology andcolleagues at Michigan State University identified a corticosteroid hormone called 11-deoxycortisol in the sea lamprey that plays dual roles in balancing ions and regulating stresses, similar to aldosterone and cortisol in humans. 

Imagine a bullet-proof vest made from a relatively simple protein processed from water - fashionable for those high-risk warzones yet still environmentally terrific.

Ancient people knew about this material 5,000 years ago and even made armor from it but  modern science can't replicate it in a laboratory - though we are getting closer.

The mystery material is silk fiber.   Silk spun by spiders and silk worms combines high strength and extensibility and fundamental discoveries in how silk fibers are made have shown that chemistry, molecular biology and biophysics all play a role in the process. These discoveries have provided the basis for a new generation of applications for silk materials, from medical devices and drug delivery to electronics.

Body checking in hockey, intentionally slamming an opponent against the boards, is regarded as violence under the guise of sports, according to hockey detractors, but injury numbers don't agree - at least in young players.

Findings from a new study show that 66 percent of overall injuries were caused by accidentally hitting the boards or goal posts, colliding with teammates or being hit by a puck.   Only 34 percent of the injuries were caused by checking. Moreover, the accidental injuries were more severe than those from body checks. 

The results appeared in June issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine and were a surprise to the researchers at the University at Buffalo who conducted the five-year study.