It takes about 90 minutes to transmit a high-resolution image from Mars, but a new NASA optical communications system that NASA plans to demonstrate in 2016 will be so much faster it will even allow the streaming of high-definition video from distances beyond the Moon. 

This dramatically enhanced transmission speed will be demonstrated by the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), one of three projects selected by NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) for a trial run. To be developed by a team led by engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., LCRD is expected to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite developed by Space Systems/Loral, of Palo Alto, Calif.

Researchers have sequenced the genome of a man who was an Aboriginal Australian and used that to show that modern day Aboriginal Australians are the direct descendants of the first people who arrived on the continent some 50,000 years ago and that those ancestors left Africa earlier than their European and Asian counterparts. 

Anti-science progressive alarmists have been on a rampage against Bisphenol A (BPA), a common component of plastic used in many consumer products, because of concern it can mimic natural estrogen in the body. A new study by Brown University toxicologists, however, finds that male mice whose mothers were exposed even to high doses of BPA while pregnant developed no signs of harm to their testes as adults.

In the study, a team led by Mary Hixon, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown University and lead author Jessica LaRocca, a graduate student, exposed mice to BPA during days 10 through 16 of their pregnancy, the period of time when the sexual organs of their fetuses were developing.

The National Health Service (NHS), the United Kingdom's public health care systems, wasted $976 million during the years 2000-2009 on synthetic forms of insulin, when the recommended human alternatives, which are considerably cheaper, would have been just as effective, based on an analysis of publicly available data from the four UK prescription pricing agencies. Costs were adjusted for inflation and reported at 2010 prices.

Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping the Higgs boson is found at the LHC for a big reason - they think it can explain universal expansion and even reveal the possible existence of another closely related particle.

The Higgs boson would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. but a group of EPFL physicists say it would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth - and it could be verified with data from the Planck satellite.

To religious fundamentalists, atheists in science are engaged in an insidious campaign to undercut morality and replace it with God-less relativism and moral equivalence.  To militant atheists, religious people are intellectually immature, anti-science busybodies telling people how to live.