Stem cell researchers trying to understand the mechanisms that determine whether stem cells divide or differentiate, and what types of cells they become and how to control them to develop new treatments, may have gotten some much needed help.

Investigators at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have made a comparative, large-scale phosphoproteomic analysis of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and their differentiated derivatives. The study was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Comets contained vast oceans of liquid water in their interiors during the first million years of their formation, argue Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. 

The watery environment of early comets, together with the vast quantity of organics already discovered in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply, they say. 

Previously thought to be indivisible, with negative charge for all, the electron is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature. A new experiment, however, has shown that electrons, if crowded into narrow wires, are seen to split apart.

The electron is responsible for carrying electricity in wires and for making magnets. These two properties of magnetism and electric charge are carried by electrons which seem to have no size or shape and are impossible to break apart.

There has long been an on-again, off-again debate about the health effects of red wine. Is it killing our liver or is it preventing the next pandemic? It appears scientists from Scotland and Singapore have answered this question.

Red wine is healthy because the resveratrol it contains controls inflammation. But how? New research published in the August 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), not only explains resveratrol's one-two punch on inflammation, but also show how it—or a derivative—can be used to treat potentially deadly inflammatory disease, such as appendicitis, peritonitis, and systemic sepsis.

Plancks Law is a well-established physical law describes the transfer of heat between two objects.

Some physicists have predicted that the law should break down when the objects are very close together but scientists had never been able to confirm, or measure, this breakdown in practice.


MIT researchers say they have now done it but that the heat transfer can be 1,000 times greater than the law predicts.  The new findings could lead to better design of recording heads of the hard disks used for computer data storage,and new kinds of devices for harvesting energy from heat that would otherwise be wasted. 

A University of Exeter research team recently tested squirrels' ability to learn to choose between two pots of food after watching another squirrel remove a nut from one of the pots.

One group was rewarded for choosing the same pot as the previous squirrel, the second group was rewarded for targeting the other pot. Those that were rewarded for choosing food from the other pot learned more quickly than those that were rewarded for choosing the same pot. This suggests that grey squirrels learn more quickly to recognize the absence of food.