The NY Times today has a profile on Shinya Yamanaka, the senior author on one of the recent papers reporting the creation of pluripotent stem cells by expressing 4 transcription factor genes in adult…

Four billion years ago, says Steve Desch, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Uranus and Neptune switched places. His research work appears…

Surrounding the small islands of genes within the human genome is a vast sea of non-coding DNA. While most of this DNA is junk, some of it is used to help genes turn on and off. Hopkins researchers…

At a Monday meeting of the American Geophysical Union, NASA's Associate Administrator for Science Alan Stern announced the selection of a new mission that will peer deep inside the moon to reveal its…

A hydrogen fuel cell works by pumping hydrogen gas through a proton exchange membrane causing the hydrogen to give up electrons in the form of electricity, which combines with oxygen gas to form…

Organic compounds contain carbon and hydrogen and form the building blocks of all life on Earth. By analyzing organic material and minerals in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001, scientists at…

Measures to protect astronauts from health risks caused by space radiation will be important during extended missions to the moon or Mars, say researchers in a paper currently online in Experimental…

Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new model of global carbon and nitrogen cycling that will fundamentally transform the understanding of how plants and soils interact with a…

A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of…

A team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to detect, for the first time, strong evidence of hazes in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star. The discovery comes…

We've reached an important milestone on our CombiUgi project involving the synthesis of falcipain-2 inhibitors. In my last update I described how our focus was more on doing many reactions in…

Mood and anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorders but psychiatrists remain divided as to how to define and classify them. Definitions in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual…

Cancer patients are suffering unnecessarily because they wrongly believe that morphine and other opioids are only used as “comfort for the dying” and as a “last resort” rather than seeing them as…

It has been 35 years since humans last walked on the moon, but there has been much recent discussion about returning, either for exploration or to stage a mission to Mars. However, there are concerns…

Although psychiatrists are among the least religious physicians, they seem to be the most interested in the religious and spiritual dimensions of their patients, according to survey data published in…

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), chemicals used as fire retardants, can be found in numerous items in the home, such as the television, computer, toaster and the sofa. Now, as reported in a…

As the United Nations climate negotiations proceed in Bali, Indonesia, researchers have taken a first step toward quantifying the "socioclimatic" exposure of different countries to future climate…

Recently, the notion of "dark energy" has become well-established, suggesting that the universe is expanding ever-more-rapidly with time. Nothing about this notion makes sense, and I find myself…

When a female is attracted to a male, entire suites of genes in her brain turn on and off, show biologists from The University of Texas at Austin studying swordtail fish. Molly Cummings and Hans…

A new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190…