News Articles

Is it a shrub?  No one really knows. A fossilized specimen, a roughly elliptical shape with multiple lobes, totaling almost seven feet in length, was unveiled today at the North-Central Section 46th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Dayton, Ohio.Around 450 million years ago, shallow seas covered the Cincinnati region and harbored one very large and now very mysterious organism. Despite its size, no one has ever found a fossil of this "monster" until its discovery by an citizen paleontologist, Ron Fine of Dayton, last year. 

Half-mile-sized objects have been seen punching through parts of Saturn's F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.  These mini-jets' trails in the rings fill in a missing link in our understanding of the curious behavior of the F ring. Scientists have known that relatively large objects like the moon Prometheus, 92 miles across, can create channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring but what happened to these snowballs after they were created was unclear. 

Commonly prescribed anti-depressants appear to be doing patients more harm than good, say researchers who have published a paper examining the impact of the medications on the entire body.

Prostate cancer is a type of cancer that starts in the prostate gland and usually occurs in older men. Recent data shows that about 1 in 36 men will die of prostate cancer. Estimated new cases and deaths from this disease condition in the US in 2012 alone are 241,740 and 28,170, respectively. Current treatment options for patients include surgery, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, chemotherapy, and immune therapy. Unfortunately, these are associated with considerable complications and/or severe side effects.

Here's an astronomy puzzles: Rather than occupying orbits at regular distances from a star, giant gas planets, like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system, appear to prefer to occupy certain regions in mature solar systems while staying clear of others, which results in “planet pileups” and “planet deserts."Researchers identified high-energy radiation from baby sun-like stars as the likely force that carves gaps in protoplanetary disks, the clouds of gas and dust that swirl around young stars and provide the raw materials for planets. The gaps then act as barricades, corralling planets into certain orbits. 

If you are freezing eggs or ovarian tissue to delay childbearing for social reasons, society should reply 'thanks, but no thanks', according to a recent analysis.

ONO-4641, an investigational oral drug, reduced the number of lesions in people with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to the results of a phase two clinical trial to be presented this week at the American Academy of Neurology Meeting in New Orleans.

Tattoos and body piercings are so ubiquitous in western societies that they are more cliché than  edgy, but social scientists in France say they may be more than fashion trends - they may be harbingers of doom. Individuals who get them  are also more likely to engage in risky behaviors that include substance and alcohol use. 

The second-largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction, coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. The Late Ordovician mass extinction occurred about 450 million years ago and was related to climate change, that has been known, but exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not. A team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a framework for weighing the factors that might have led to mass extinction and has used that framework to determine that the majority of extinctions were caused by habitat loss due to falling sea levels and cooling of the tropical oceans.

In a development that would be bad for the U.S. Department of Energy but good for solar power worldwide, a new process developed by scientists at the University of Cambridge has the potential to drive down the cost of manufacturing solar-grade silicon and boost use of photovoltaic devices.

Widely accepted theories of dark matter,  a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts, expect the solar neighborhood to be filled with the stuff - but it isn't, at least as far as can be detected.

Don't get too excited but 200 activists are going to jump off Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
These aren't the usual pesky environmentalists, these are hang-gliding global activists, which really sounds like just an excuse to go hang-gliding but get permits to do it in cool places but it's still going to raise money for a worthy cause.