A new review provides intriguing insights on parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, in snakes.

Interestingly, facultative parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction in an otherwise sexually reproducing species, appears to be quite common among snakes and may represent a potentially important feature of vertebrate evolution. On the other hand, obligate parthogenesis--when organisms exclusively reproduce through asexual means--is extremely rare in snakes.

While researchers' understanding of these reproductive phenomena is in its infancy, the review provides the necessary first steps for investigating the origin and evolution of parthenogenesis in snakes.

The biomedical sciences rarely provide full protocol, data, and necessary level of transparency to verify or replicate studies, according to an analysis of papers published between 2000 and 2014 to determine the extent researchers report key information necessary for properly evaluating and replicating published research, including availability of protocols, data, and the frequency of published novel or replication studies.

The results: 1 out of 441 articles drawn from across the biomedical literature provided a full protocol and no paper made all the data available. The majority of studies didn't state funding or conflicts of interest and replication studies were very rare.

Researchers have taken what they hope will be the first step toward preventing and reversing age-related stem cell dysfunction and metabolic disease, including diabetes, which affects 12.2 million Americans age 60 and older, according to the National Council on Aging.

How can life originate from a lifeless chemical soup? This question has puzzled scientists since Darwin's 'Origin of species'. University of Groningen chemistry professor Sijbren Otto studies 'chemical evolution' to see if self-organization and autocatalysis will provide the answer. His research group previously developed self-replicating molecules -- molecules that can make copies of themselves -- and have now observed diversification in replicator mutants. They found that if you start with one ancestral set of replicator mutants, a second set will branch off spontaneously. This means that ecological diversity as encountered in biology may well have its roots at the molecular level. The results were published on Jan. 4, 2016, in Nature Chemistry.

Strong magnetic fields discovered have been discovered in a majority of stars. An international group of astronomers led by the University of Sydney has discovered strong magnetic fields are common in stars, not rare as previously thought, using data from NASA's Kepler mission.

The team found that stars only slightly more massive than the Sun have internal magnetic fields up to 10 million times that of the Earth.

People tend to gain in self-esteem as they grow older but in Western industrialized  nations the self-esteem gender gap is more pronounced - though the actual gender gap in all ways is lower in those same nations. At least on surveys.

Social psychologists analyzed survey data from over 985,000 men and women ages 16-45 from 48 countries. The data were collected from July 1999 to December 2009 as part of the Gosling-Potter Internet Personality Project. The researchers compared self-reported self-esteem, gender and age across the 48 nations in their study.