How does life survive in the black depths of the ocean? At the surface, sunlight allows green plants to "fix" carbon from the air to build their bodies. Around hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean live communities of giant clams with no gut and no functional digestive system, depending on symbiotic bacteria to use energy locked up in hydrogen sulfide to replace sunlight.

The life cycles of many viruses include a self-assembly stage in which a powerful molecular motor must pack the DNA genome into the virus's preformed shell (the capsid). How it manages this intricate feat has been subject to debate, but we know that the DNA passes into the capsid shell through a channel formed by a structure called the connector.

How does the heart attain its characteristic shape? Shape may be sculpted by cell movement, cell division, or changes in cell size and shape, all of which can be influenced by the local environment. The heart appears as a simple tube early in development; later, the tube walls bulge outward to form the cardiac chambers.

In a new study published online in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Heidi Auman, Deborah Yelon, and colleagues found, by using transgenic zebrafish in which they can watch individual cardiac cells, that cells change size and shape, enlarging and elongating to form the bulges in the heart tube and eventually the chambers.

North American marine turtles are at risk if global warming occurs at predicted levels, according to scientists from the University of Exeter. An increase in temperatures of just one degree Celsius could completely eliminate the birth of male turtles from some beaches. A rise of three degrees Celsius would lead to extreme levels of infant mortality and declines in nesting beaches across the USA.

Here are the good ones. Read the entire piece here.

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

5. Three points determine a curve.

6. Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

19.

It was great to meet with a number of the top executives at GM prior to the Chicago Auto Show to learn about the Chevrolet Volt, the company commitment to developing battery technology and to really find out how committed this company is and will be in the area of cleaner automobiles.  However there is one interview that truly stands out that needs to be shared.

On Feb. 19 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, movie lovers get a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the physics-based simulations that breathe life into fantasy.

"It is an exhaustive task to prescribe the motion of every degree of freedom in a piece of clothing or a crashing wave," says Ron Fedkiw, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford who will speak about computations used to make solids and fluids more realistic in feature films. "Since these motions are governed by physical processes, it can be difficult to make these phenomena appear natural. Thus, physically based simulation has become quite popular in the special effects industry.

In case you have been hiding under a rock, there was the scientific equivalent of an earth-shattering thunderclap that emanated from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meetins held February 15th-19th in San Francisco - to be honest, they pretend everything they say is big news, you can see 20 articles from it just on this site - but I mean this was legitimately big news.

Was it that they had to take an internal vote to decide if there is global warming? No, they've been run exclusively by Democrats for decades and after "An Inconvenient Truth" they needed to help garner support for an Academy Award.

The harmful environmental effects of livestock production are becoming increasingly serious at all levels—local, regional, national and global—and urgently need to be addressed, according to researchers from Stanford University, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other organizations. The researchers, representing five countries, will present their findings on Feb. 19 at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Francisco during a symposium entitled, "Livestock in a Changing Landscape: Drivers, Consequences and Responses."

Better tie that string around your finger a little tighter.

It may turn out the reason some people grow increasingly forgetful as they age is less about how old they are and more about subtle changes in the way the brain files memories and makes room for new ones - differences perhaps better blamed on patterns of cell-to-cell communication than the number of birthday candles decorating the cake.

A researcher with the McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida has found that rats become forgetful because a routine part of the memory process falls out of kilter, no matter their ages.

This change seems to be related to the chemicals necessary for brain cells to communicate with each other.