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It won't make it readable, but University of Arizona researchers have cracked at least one of the puzzles surrounding the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody can make any sense of.Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in department of physics says the manuscript's parchment pages date back to the early 15th century, making the book a century older than previously thought. It's nonsensical structure has kept the Voynich manuscript fascinating for the 50 people who care; rows of text scrawled on visibly aged parchment, flowing around intricately drawn illustrations depicting plants, astronomical charts and human figures bathing in, some claim, the fountain of youth.

Arches in human feet have been instrumental in our ability to walk upright and researchers at the University of Missouri and Arizona State University say they have found proof that arches existed in a predecessor to the human species, Australopithecus afarensis, that lived more than 3 million years ago. 

Metastasis is when tumor cells move from the primary tumor to distant tissues - it is metastasis of the primary tumor that kills most cancer patients. One of the least studied routes of metastasis is the lymphatic system, though many tumors produce factors that promote the formation of new lymphatic vessels (lymphangiogenesis). The newly formed lymphatic vessels enable tumor cells to travel from the primary tumor to the regional lymph nodes from whence they can spread throughout the body.Current treatment practice is to surgically remove the primary tumor as well as the metastatic lymph nodes, but tumor cells in metastatic transit inside the lymphatic vessels have not been given much attention. 

A milestone in the international Avogadro project coordinated by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) has been reached - with the aid of a single crystal of highly enriched 28Si, the Avogadro constant has now been measured more precisely than ever before, with a relative overall uncertainty of 3 · 10-8.Within the scope of the redefinition of the kilogram, the value NA = 6.02214078(18) · 1023 mol-1 allows a more exact realization of this unit. 

Bacteria attack with toxins designed to hijack or kill host cells but they have ways of protecting themselves from their own toxins.   Researchers have described one of these protective mechanisms, potentially paving the way for new classes of antibiotics that cause the bacteria's toxins to turn on themselves.Scientists determined the structures of a toxin and its antitoxin in Streptococcus pyogenes, common bacteria that cause infections ranging from strep throat to life-threatening conditions like rheumatic fever. In Strep, the antitoxin is bound to the toxin in a way that keeps the toxin inactive.

Two STEREO spacecraft are now 180 degrees apart from each other and providing scientists with a 360-degree view of the Sun. NASA's STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft were launched on October 25, 2006, and have been gathering images of solar activity, especially solar storms, since the mission began.

As the 21st century unfolds, if even one woman does not get a job, there will be claims of discrimination.   And some will believe discrimination occurs institutionally despite the evidence, and insist any action by individuals is proof of sexism.   That's the nature of humans being humans.

X-ray imaging technology is helping scientists better understand how snakes lost their legs during evolution and perhaps help help resolve the debate about whether they evolved from a terrestrial lizard or from one that lived in the oceans. New 3-D images in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology reveal that the internal architecture of an ancient snake's leg bones strongly resembles that of modern terrestrial lizard legs.

The human brain works incredibly fast but visual impressions are so complex that their processing takes up to several hundred milliseconds before they enter our consciousness. Researchers say they know why this delay may vary in length; if you already know what you are about to see, you recognize it faster.When the brain possesses some prior information, such as when it already knows what it is about to see, conscious recognition occurs faster.    There has been some debate about whether or not the processes leading up to conscious perception were more rigid and if their timing varied.

Between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago, the first farmers from Asia were already cultivating land in what is now Greece, according to archaeological remains, but in places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and Northern Germany farming did not happen until around 3,000 years later.One of the most significant socioeconomic changes in the history of humanity started taking place around 10,000 years ago, when the Near East went from an economy based on hunting and gathering (Mesolithic) to another kind on agriculture (Neolithic) and farming rapidly entered the Balkan Peninsula and then advanced gradually throughout the rest of Europe.

Sure, Los Angeles has a terrible smog issue but it could be worse; movie stars could live on Titan.  Titan, Saturn's largest moon, looks like a dirty orange ball but the actual composition is more like crude oil without the sulfur.  Titan's haze is made of tiny droplets of hydrocarbons with other, more noxious chemicals mixed in. But as nasty as that sounds, Titan is the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere worthy of a planet at all.  At least it has lightning, drizzle and occasionally a big, summer-downpour style of cloud made of methane or ethane, hydrocarbons best known for their role in natural gas.

The search for actively 'jumping' genes in humans has found new evidence that the genome contains numerous pesky mobile elements that may help to explain why people have such a variety of physical traits and disease risks. Using bioinformatics, the study in Genome Research set out to compare the standard assembly of genetic elements as outlined in the reference human genome to raw whole-genome data from 310 individuals recently made available by the 1000 Genomes Project, the team found 1,016 new insertions of retrotransposon insertion polymorphisms (RIPs), expanding the catalog of insertions that are present in some individuals and absent in others.