To astrobiologists, hot springs hold a great deal of significance.   Many of the most ancient organisms on Earth thrived in and around hydrothermal springs and their modern descendants still do.

If life forms have ever been present on Mars, hot spring deposits would be ideal locations to search for physical or chemical evidence of these organisms and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggesting there might be evidence of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater would be a fine place to look, according to a report in Astrobiology.

Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been known to exert a cooling effect on climate. This has partly masked the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases. As aerosol pollution is predicted to decrease over the next few decades, unmasking of the greenhouse effect may lead to accelerated global warming.

Research performed in the Center for Biomolecular Science&Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that mobile repetitive elements--also known as transposons or "jumping genes"--do indeed affect the evolution of gene regulatory networks.

A little more than a year after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists showed they could turn skin cells back into stem cells, they have pulsating proof that these "induced" stem cells can indeed form the specialized cells that make up heart muscle. 

In a study published  in Circulation Research, the team showed that they were able to grow working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) from induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells. 

The heart cells were originally reprogrammed from human skin cells by James Thomson and Junying Yu, two of Kamp's co-authors on the study. 

A York University research team has tracked the migration of songbirds,  the most common type of bird in our skies, by outfitting them with tiny geolocator backpacks – a world first and interesting because they are too small for conventional satellite tracking.    They now say we have underestimated the flight performance of songbirds dramatically.

Adaptation is one of the driving forces behind evolution, along with selection and the appearance of new species, say a group of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München researchers, but they say that the interpretation familiar since Darwin - these processes increase the "fitness" of the species overall, since, of two competing species, only the fittest would survive - is actually a case of the fittest being the 'weakest'  most often.