Researchers using  ‘metagenomics’,  the open-ended sequencing of DNA from samples without the need for culture or target-specific amplification or enrichment, have recovered tuberculosis (TB) genomes from the lung tissue of a 215-year old mummy using a technique known as metagenomics.

Lots of people who watch the news see when records, some that have stood for a hundred years, are broken in heat waves. But the increase in minimum daily temperatures is telling a more interesting story than maximum ones. Since 1901, nighttime heat waves, when the daily low is in the top 1 percent of the temperatures on record for at least three nights in a row, have quadrupled, according to a new paper.

Researchers found that these nighttime heat waves are becoming more frequent in western Washington and Oregon. It's a good time to stay inside and read this article because, on average, heat waves tend to strike around the last week of July.

A potential barrier to deep Antarctic circumpolar flow until the late Miocene?

On July 18th, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured an image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun's north pole.

Coronal holes are dark, low density regions of the sun's outermost atmosphere, the corona, and contain little solar material and lower temperatures so they appear much darker than their surroundings.

The orbital motion of two distinct populations of stars in an ancient globular star cluster, 47 Tucanae, have offered proof they formed at different times and it provides a rare look back into the Milky Way galaxy's early days.

The researchers combined recent Hubble observations with eight years' worth of data from the telescope's archive to determine the motions of the stars in 47 Tucanae, located about 16,700 light-years away in the southern constellation Tucana. The analysis enabled researchers, for the first time, to link the movement of stars in the clusters with the stars' ages. The two populations in 47 Tucanae differ in age by less than 100 million years.

Neural tube defects affect more than 300,000 babies born around the world each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neural tube defects, including anencephaly and spina bifida, are caused by the incomplete closure or development of the spine and skull. 

Using dogs as a model, researchers recently found that a gene related to neural tube defects in man's best friend may be an important risk factor for human neural tube defects. The cause of neural tube defects is poorly understood but has long been thought to be associated with genetic, nutritional and environmental factors.