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The coelacanth has one of the longest lineages, 400 million years, of any animal and is the closest living fish to all vertebrates alive on land. Now it has a new member.Pieces of tiny fossil skull found in Fort Worth have been identified as 100 million-year-old coelacanth bones, according to paleontology graduate student John F. Graf of Southern Methodist University.  That places it in the the Cretaceous geologic period, which extended from 146 million years ago to 66 million years ago. 

Researchers have discovered bacteria that transmit electrons thousands of cell lengths away.The Desulfobulbus bacterial cells, which are only a few thousandths of a millimeter long, are so tiny that they are invisible to the naked eye. And yet, under the right circumstances, they form a multicellular filament that can transmit electrons across a distance as large as 1 centimeter as part of the filament's respiration and ingestion processes. They are living power cables.

International astronomical photographers have created a catalog of over 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way; 10X more stars than previous catalogs and a great leap forward in making some sense of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. It is so large that, if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 yards long and 7 yards high

ExAblate(R)MRI-guided Focused Ultrasound is effective in reducing pain from bone metastases in patients who could not undergo radiation therapy. Patients reported significant improvement in well-being, function, and reduction in medication use.

700 scientists and academicians have signed petitions calling on French researcher Gilles-Eric Seralini to release research data he claims is evidence for health problems associated with biotech crops.The petitioners are from every continent and represent more than 40 countries. They are urging transparency in the promotion of sound science on important issues of public health and join  calls by regulatory bodies including the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) to Seralini and his collaborators at the Committee for Research&Independent Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN) to provide the research data to back up their allegations of health and safety risks links to GMOs.

One morning last March, engineers at General Electric’s Nela Park research lab in Cleveland, Ohio, opened a century-old time capsule hidden in a corner stone of Building 307. Inside the cavity and beneath a layer of sand was a standard 40-watt Mazda incandescent bulb made at the time of Thomas Edison. The engineers brushed off the dirt, screwed the lamp into a socket, and slowly powered it on. The bulb’s soft yellow glow was like a faint echo from the Big Bang that set GE on course to become a global industrial powerhouse.

An assembly of thousands of nano-machines has produced a coordinated contraction movement - like that of muscle fibers, and it even extended to around ten micrometers, like the movements of muscular fibers.The work provides an experimental validation of a biomimetic approach that has been conceptualized for years in nanoscience and the researchers believe this broadens applications in robotics, information storage and obviously artificial muscles themselves.

Dogs are susceptible to contagious yawning just like people, says an article in Animal Cognition, but only after they get older. Dogs, like humans, show a gradual development of susceptibility to contagious yawning and the new paper says dogs catch yawns from humans. But Only dogs above seven months of age catch these human yawns - younger dogs are immune to the contagion.Contagious yawning has been researched in humans, adult chimpanzees, baboons and dogs, some speculate it can be used as a measure of empathy. Empathy, mimicking the emotional responses of others, is difficult to measure directly, but contagious yawning allows assessment of a behavioral empathetic response, the Swedish researchers say. 

A dynamic gel made of DNA mechanically responds to stimuli in much the same way that cells do. This DNA gel, at only 10 microns in width, is roughly the size of a eukaryotic cell, the type of cell of which humans are made. The miniscule gel contains within it stiff DNA nanotubes linked together by longer, flexible DNA strands that serve as the substrate for molecular motors.We won't have artificial muscles and self-propelled goo just yet, but Omar Saleh and Deborah Fygenson of UC Santa Barbara feel like they have gotten a lot closer.

Abbott today announced results from a post-hoc sub-analysis of the 52-week HUMIRA® (adalimumab) ULTRA 2 study. Results of the analysis showed clinically meaningful rates of mucosal healing at week 52 in patients with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis (UC) who failed, were intolerant or had contraindications to certain other medications and achieved a response to HUMIRA induction therapy at eight weeks. 

Blasting over two million lights years from the center of a distant galaxy, PKS 0637-752 is a 'supersonic jet' of material that looks a lot like the afterburner flow of a fighter jet - but in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is actually moving at closer to the speed of light.This megaparsec, galaxy-scale jet has bright and dark regions, similar to the phenomenon in  afterburner exhaust called ‘shock diamonds.’ This new image of the previously studied jet reveals regularly spaced areas that are brighter than the rest of the jet in a pattern that echoes the way the afterburner from a jet engine has brighter diamond-shaped areas in its general glow.

Psychology of Women Quarterly, the scientific, peer-reviewed journal of feminism, contends that there are gender stereotypes in the media - photographs of men focus on male faces while photographs of women are focused on female bodies. Such "face-ism" is even more extreme in cultures with less educational, professional, and political gender discrimination.