After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. The effort revealed evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans.

"We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans," said the paper's first author, Richard E. (Ed) Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The results of the study appear this week in Science.

Following a drop in public confidence in climate scientists as a result of the 'Climategate' emails, two hundred fifty-five members of the National Academy of Sciences have joined together to defend the rigor and objectivity of climate science.

Their signed statement, appearing  tomorrow in Science, explains the scientific research process and confirms the fundamental conclusions about climate change based on the work of thousands of scientists worldwide.

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research has found that shoppers often expect to buy a certain number of unplanned items, and most have a fairly accurate estimate as to how much they will spend on them. The authors use the term "in-store slack" to describe the room shoppers leave in their budget for unplanned purchases.

The researchers conducted a field study at several grocery stores in Texas. Shoppers were asked what they intended to purchase, how much they expected to spend on the planned items, and how much they intended to spend total. After shopping, participants provided their receipts and answered questions about themselves and their purchases. More than 75 percent of the participants included room in their mental budgets for unplanned purchases.

Washing your hands can cleanse you of past immoral behavior, it can also eliminate traces of buyer's remorse by reducing the need to justify past decisions, say psychologist writing in Science.

"It's not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research" said U-M psychologists Spike W. S.. "Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever."

Two new studies conducted by scientists at Emory University have found that simple peptides can organize into bi-layer membranes. The finding suggests a "missing link" between the pre-biotic Earth's chemical inventory and the organizational scaffolding essential to life.

"We've shown that peptides can form the kind of membranes needed to create long-range order," says chemistry graduate student Seth Childers. "What's also interesting is that these peptide membranes may have the potential to function in a complex way, like a protein."

The results were recently published in Angwandte Chemie.


Photo Credit: Emory University)

A compound in dark chocolate called epicatechin may protect the brain after a stroke by increasing cellular signals already known to shield nerve cells from damage.

After inducing an ischemic stroke in mice, John Hopkins scientists found that mice who had been fed a single modest dose of epicatechin suffered significantly less brain damage than the ones that had not been given the compound.

The study was recently published in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.