News Articles

A group of biologists have discovered seven previously unknown species of mammals on Luzon Island in the Philippines. All of the species are forest mice, and each species lives only in a small part of Luzon.   Two of the new species live only in the Zambales Mountains (on Mt. Tapulao), two live only on Mt. Banahaw (south of Manila), two only in the Mingan Mountains of Aurora Province, and one lives only in the Sierra Madre of northeastern Luzon.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet
and Helsinki University
are reporting that DCDC2, a gene linked to dyslexia, has a surprising biological function: it controls cilia, the antenna-like projections that cells use to communicate. 

Sexting, where people send photographs and sexually explicit text messages to titillate them  and perhaps increase the likelihood of a sexual relationship,  is a fairly new phenomenon. The Internet has made the act of infidelity much easier and though sex and infidelity are now only a keyboard away, the goal for many seems to remain physical, face-to-face contact, at least in sexual relationships.   Obviously plenty of people lie or try to initiate cyber-relationships with no interest in actual human contact.

You've heard or read the scenarios - rapidly escalating levels of CO2 could cause rapidly escalating temperatures, even as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit.    The problem is that they are just scenarios based on a growing, yet incomplete, understanding of how climate works.During some periods in the past, there has been 10 times the CO2 present today with little change in temperature.  At other times, temperatures have spiked rapidly but it had little to do with CO2.

BeautifulPeople.com, a dating and networking community which claims to be exclusively for good-looking people,  apparently has programming and security that was done by beautiful people rather than smart ones.  
30,000 ugly people recently invaded the site, bypassing the  "strict rating stage" where currently designated beautiful members decide the fate of new applicants.  The rating module was brought down last month, allowing anyone - regardless of looks(gasp!) - to be accepted. 

Noah and Alexis Beery were diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age 2, but knowing that was only the first step on a journey to find an answer to the children's problems.  Yet a determined mother determination and the high tech world of next-generation sequencing in the Baylor Human Genome Sequencing Center were able to solve the case.Writing in Science Translational Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine researchers, along with experts in San Diego and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, describe how the sequencing of the children's whole genome along with that of their older brother and their parents zeroed in on the gene that caused the children's genetic disorder, which enabled physicians to fine-tune the treatment of their disorder.

You may have heard that doves mate for life but they are a rarity in bird species.   In most, infidelity is a widespread phenomenon even though for females the costs are high because the cuckolded partners often reduce their parental care and extra lovers also may transmit diseases.Yet female birds are just as promiscuous as males and researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen set out to investigate why.   In a genetic long-term study of zebra finches they found that females inherit the disposition for their infidelity from their fathers.So men get the blame even when females sleep around?

Does 3-D television seem like a waste of time to you?   Perhaps you will like Smell-O-Vision more.Or not.  Even if you like neither of those things, they are waypoints on the path to immersive, interactive environments.  So buy this stuff today and some day we Science 2.0 folks can solve mysteries on the Holodeck with Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation."Television programming executives want to be able to trigger your emotions as effectively as possible so engineers have focused on sight and sound - but that doesn't mean it has to stop there.   Wouldn't Pizza-Hut love to advertise right after the characters on a program eat some pizza and you can smell it?   Indeed they would.   

Anti-science progressives in a culture war over food insist modern agriculture - including where we precisely modify changes in genetics instead of letting high-energy cosmic rays do it randomly - is bad.   But a group of anthropologists say it isn't just modern agriculture feeding billions that is bad.Apparently farming has been a health negative for mankind since it began.

Recycling is good, we are told, though in actuality government recycling has been nothing except an expensive waste, with landfills for recycled materials as big as landfills for regular garbage.Now it turns out recycled packaging may be risking our health more directly.  Harmful mineral oils from the printing inks used on cardboard can migrate into food if recycled cardboard is used for food packaging. It may contaminate food even if the recycled cardboard is used for the corrugated card transport box that holds individual packs.

Using living cells as more efficient tools for delivering medicines  to diseased parts of the body has  gotten a little closer.   In a new report, Dayang Wang and colleagues explain that the human body's efficiency in getting rid of foreign substances can also be an obstacle. Some foreign substances, such as viruses, are harmful and should obviously be removed, but the body also considers drugs and nanoparticles — meant to treat diseases and allow physicians to see cells and organs — to be foreign objects, and they are also quickly removed.

Only nostalgia zealots can argue we are not in a Golden Age for animated movies. 2010 gave us classics like "Megamind", "Toy Story 3" and the one movie to rule them all, "Tangled." These awesome animated family movies are just a few of the reasons why we are in the Golden Age of cartoons, and we do not even have to include "The Incredibles", "Finding Nemo", or "Up". The characters and story had heart and compelling plots.They also had physics.