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Potentially huge news published today in the journal Cell is the result of two years of collaboration between teams lead by Jay Bradner of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Martin Matzuk Baylor College of Medicine. Bradner, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains the origins of this research as…
A new report based on input from the science community outlines the most pressing objectives over the next decade for studying the sun and the far-reaching effects of solar activity. The report, released by the National Research Council, identifies specific science goals and provides recommendations for how to maintain robust and effective programs despite budgetary…
Scientists measuring the sun were shocked to find it’s the most perfectly round natural object in the universe. Until now experts have always assumed that the sun bulged a bit around the middle – making it very slightly flying-saucer shaped. But the bulge is so small that if the sun was the size of a…
There’s no place on Earth that’s changing faster – and no place where that change matters more – than Greenland. Late last month, NASA reported that ice all across the vast glacial interior of the world’s largest island was melting – a “freak event” that hadn’t occurred for at least 150 years. The alarming discovery…
The common ancestor of sharks and humans — and all jawed animals with a backbone for that matter — possessed a sixth sense: the ability to detect electrical fields under water. The anatomical tools for this ability, called electroreceptors and electrosensory ampullary organs, arose from the same cell population in both cartilaginous fishes (such as…
An experiment five years ago suggested that babies are equipped with an innate moral compass, which drives them to choose good individuals over the bad in a wooden puppet show. But new research casts doubt on those findings, demonstrating that a baby’s apparent preference for what’s right might just reflect a fondness for bouncy things….
The newly discovered Phoenix cluster may be one of the most extreme objects ever observed, being among the most massive, luminous, and productive clusters in the universe. Located about 5.7 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, it has a mass roughly 2,500 trillion times that of the sun. Distributed between the galaxies in…
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is hosting a competition to reinvent the toilet for the 2.5 billion people around the world who don’t have access to modern sanitation. Entries must operate without running water, electricity or a septic system, not discharge pollutants, capture energy or other resources, and operate at a cost of 5…
Scientists at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have managed to produce a solid-state maser — a device similar to a laser which uses microwaves instead of light — capable of operating at room temperature, potentially opening the way for a revolution in deep space communication. Masers are currently used to boost radio signals from…
Scientists taking advantage of the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, have observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons…