The more new planets we find, and the tally of confirmed planets orbiting other stars is now more than 500, the less we seem to know about how planetary systems are born.

We're heading for a golden age of discovery, says Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley in National Geographic, but that bonanza has been a headache for theoreticians because many of the newly discovered star systems defy existing models of how planets form.

The eight planets of our solar system all have roughly circular orbits, and models of planet-forming disks suggest most other star systems should be the same.

In reality, though, only about one in three of the known exoplanets has a circular or near-circular orbit.

Fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster) can smell the difference between hydrogen and its heavier counterpart, deuterium, according to recent research, which they say offers support for a controversial hypothesis of how olfaction works - namely that odorants are identified not according to molecular shape, but by their atomic vibrations.

The flies can also be conditioned by electric-shock treatment to exhibit aversion to either form of the molecule, and the researchers say that shows they can clearly distinguish between them. 

In physics, it is sometimes the case that the act of observation changes the thing being observed.  While it isn't that extreme in biology, a study in PLoS One may mean a genome biologists think is accurate may not be so.

Up to 20 percent of the nonhuman genomes they examined were contaminated with human DNA, they say, a discovery they made while looking for a human virus.   They found so much human-looking DNA in nonhuman genomes that they did a specific search for the common human sequence AluY, which occurs one million times in the human genome.   It could be skin.

You know how you sometimes can sense that something is present even though you can't see it? Well, astronomers are getting that feeling about a giant, hidden object in space.   

Electricity has a new little sister: magnetricity.

A team of physicists in England has created magnetic charges — isolated north and south magnetic poles — and induced them to flow in crystals no bigger than a centimeter across. These moving magnetic charges, which behave almost exactly like electrical charges flowing through batteries and biological systems, could one day be useful in developing “magnetronic” devices — though what such devices would do is anybody’s guess.

Read ScienceNews for the full story.

National Review scribe Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, tackles the PNAS study I discussed in Women In Science: No Discrimination, Says Cornell Study and comes to the same conclusion virtually everyone except people who refuse to believe in any data at all accepts - while discrimination was obviously once endemic in academia and everywhere else, it is no longer there.   

The most fit will survive to reproduce, passing on their genes to the next generation. This, of course, is Darwin's theory of natural selection. An individual pursues the most genetically fit partner to pass on favorable traits to offspring, increasing their chance of reproductive success.

But it is 2011, and with hair gel and a dearth of natural predators, humans function outside of these bounds. Fathers do not hunt for food, and mothers do not fight off tigers. The act of survival simply is not that difficult — most everyone lives to reproductive age. So how do humans choose a mate?

Lady Gaga may seem outrageous but everything about her is meat dresses and crazy hair is so pre-planned it's downright...conservative.

Conservatives like the way it was and, for everyone who has listened to "Born This Way", her new single, she likes the way it was too - namely when Madonna did "Express Yourself."

Tris McCall at the Star-Ledger says what everyone has been thinking yet radio (and music) people won't say, lest she last as long as Madonna and ignore them in the future for present-day slights:

We can complain about the knowledge of Americans (while simultaneously complaining that modern school efforts 'teach the test' and focus on facts rather than on critical thinking) but Russians are farther behind.   

One in every three Russians thinks Sol revolves around the Earth, rather than the Earth orbiting the sun.  29% believe man and dinosaurs co-existed.

Maybe they are really good at critical thinking, though, and just don't know some facts.