Researchers who were looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth have found a hardy few. A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi, and other rudimentary organisms, called archaea,…
Neutrinos are most definitely not faster than light after all, says CERN. The laws of physics got the good news at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, in a talk titled “The neutrino velocity measurement by OPERA experiment.” Slides accompanying the talk say the faster-than-light results generated in 2011 were…
Welcome to Animation Domination, Stone Age style. By about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoon-like techniques to give observers the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across cave walls, two French investigators find. Ancient artists created graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks, say archaeologist…
There’s ample evidence that a more entrepreneurial approach to postsecondary education is overdue. While some pioneering ventures are under way, numerous barriers continue to slow innovation and thwart experimentation, both in traditional institutions and in startup ventures that aspire to disrupt the existing marketplace. Against this backdrop, the Kauffman Foundation convened a diverse group of…
There is an understandable tendency to put problems of the ‘global commons’— climate change or biodiversity loss, for instance — in the hands of intergovernmental institutions. However, thus far these bodies have failed miserably. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), born at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20 years…
With simple arguments, researchers show that nature is complicated! Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have made a simple experiment that demonstrates that nature violates common sense — the world is different than most people believe. The experiment illustrates that light does not behave according to the principles of classical physics, but that light has…
The Spitzer Space Telescope has looked back in time to see what scientists called the “faint, lumpy glow” given off by the very first objects in the Universe, and these ancient objects obviously provided some early cosmic fireworks. While they are too faint and distant to figure out what the individual objects are – they…
Scientists who reprogrammed skin cells into brain cells say their research could lay the groundwork for new ways to treat Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. The team at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco transferred a gene called Sox2 into both mouse and human skin cells. Within days, the skin cells transformed into early-stage brain…
Planet or not, Pluto and its newest moons may tell us a lot about how other worlds orbit distant stars. A new computer simulation based on the motions of Pluto’s satellites not only zeroes in on the masses of two of the moons but predicts that planets orbiting double stars are more widely spaced from…
For the first time, researchers have determined virtually the entire genome of a fetus using only a blood sample from the pregnant woman and a saliva specimen from the father. The accomplishment heralds an era in which parents might find it easier to know the complete DNA blueprint of a child months before it is…