While traditionally we think of only double helix DNA, scientists from Cambridge University in England have made an interesting discovery. According to the researchers, a quadruple helix is also present in some cells and is believed to relate to cancer in some ways. According to the researchers, controlling these quadruple helix structures could provide new…
New research links loneliness to a number of dysfunctional immune responses, suggesting that being lonely has the potential to harm overall health. Researchers, who will present the findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in New Orleans, found that people who were more lonely showed signs of elevated latent herpes virus…
New astonishing pictures by the European Space Agency have revealed a 1,500km long and 7km wide river that once ran across Mars. The agency’s Mars Express imaged the striking upper part of the remnants of Reull Vallis river on Mars with its high-resolution stereo camera, ESA said. Reull Vallis, is believed to have formed when…
In your wildest dreams, could you imagine a government that builds its policies on carefully gathered scientific evidence? One that publishes the rationale behind its decisions, complete with data, analysis and supporting arguments? Well, dream no longer: that’s where Great Britain is heading.
It’s a wilderness out there in outer space. And as robotic surrogates set the stage for human footprints on Mars and other planetary bodies, just how much respect for other worlds should we have? One suggested response would establish planetary parks for the solar system, an answer that ties together space science and exploration, ethics,…
A special panel of scientists issued a report detailing the dozens of ways how climate change is already disrupting the health, homes and other facets of daily American life. It warns that those disruptions will increase in the future. The report uses the word “threat” or variations of it 198 times and versions of the…
It may not be self-aware (yet) but this computing monster is ready to take over the world. Well, at least a telescope in Chile. Say hello to the correlator for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submilimeter Array, or ALMA. The correlator is the computer that runs at the backend of an array of radio telescopes called an…
Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that…
Anyone who’s generously given their DNA to genomic research under the assumption that their personal biological code would be kept confidential might be in for a surprise. The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research’s Yaniv Erlich and his colleagues were able to connect “anonymous” DNA with specific individuals using just an Internet connection and other publicly…
Disgust is the subject of numerous recent works in widely different areas of philosophy, including moral and legal philosophy, aesthetics, and the new iteration of what is being called “experimental philosophy.” Perhaps because disgust is a focused passion, the most fruitful recent work on it has come from the sort of research that is of…