News Articles

Sequence gaps in human chromosome 15 have been closed by the application of 454 technology. Researchers writing in Genome Biology have described a simple and scalable method for finishing non-structural gaps in genome assemblies.

Manuel Garber worked with a team of researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts, USA, to develop an approach for closing class III gaps, those non-structural gaps that are refractory to clone-based approaches, using 454 sequencing.

We're somewhat lost in how to meet future carbon footprint goals.  Heck, Germany should have been able to just close a few Soviet-era East German factories and hit their Kyoto protocol targets but even they couldn't do it.   The answer, as always, may be in nature.   Some parts of outer space are great at getting rid of excess carbon, including an unusual carbon-rich star that was part of a mystery stellar explosion recorded in 2006.

"We were on a break," is just an excuse likely to get you yelled at today but a new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa, Panama says there may be some long-term value in it - at least if you are an ant.Fungus-farming ants have cultivated the same fungal crops for 50 million years, they say.  Each young ant queen carries a bit of fungus garden with her when she flies away to mate and establish a new nest. Short breaks in the ants' relationship with the fungus during nest establishment may contribute to the stability of this long-term mutualism.

African-Americans are significantly more likely to be sanctioned by the United States welfare system than Caucasians, according to research published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, but is there bias?  Welfare sanctions in response to rules violations should be applied, in both law and principle, according to behavior and not characteristics like race, yet Sanford F. Schram, a professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, says that is exactly what happens."This study provides powerful evidence that race and stereotype-consistent traits interact to shape the allocation of punishment at the frontlines of welfare reform," according to Schram.

The terms 'athlete' and 'jock' are sometimes used interchangeably - especially be people who dislike athletes.   And it's usually negative.   Due to that, only 18 percent of students in a recent study strongly identified with the identity of "jock," while 55 percent strongly identified with the identity of "athlete."   Students were twice as likely to reject the jock label.

A University of Leicester student will be presenting his discovery of 425 million year-old fossils found in rocks from the Silurian period of geological time in Herefordshire.  The fossils represent a great range of animal groups and their study has tremendously increased knowledge of the evolution of life.David Riley’s research represents the first major attempt by scientists to understand the preservation pathway giving us a rare ‘window’ into a Silurian sea floor environment.

Penguin poo (guano) stains, visible from space, have helped British scientists locate emperor penguin breeding colonies in Antarctica. Knowing their location provides a baseline for monitoring their response to environmental change.   In a new study published this week in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) describe how they used satellite images to survey the sea-ice around 90% of Antarctica's coast to search for emperor penguin colonies. The survey identified a total of 38. Ten of those were new.Of the previously known colonies six had re-located and six were not found.

A new, international study found that the combination of two drugs delays disease progression for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Results from the Phase III “ATLAS” trial were presented today by Dr. Vincent Miller of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting. According to the National Cancer Institute, in 2008 the estimated number of new lung cancer cases (non-small cell and small cell combined) was 215,000 and the number of deaths was 161,840. Non-small cell lung cancer is the most common among all lung cancers and is usually associated with a history of tobacco use.

Recent research says that talking on a cell phone poses a dangerous distraction for drivers and others whose attention should be focused elsewhere and now a new study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology finds that just the ring of a cell phone may be equally distracting, especially when it comes in a classroom setting or includes a familiar song as a ringtone.Students exposed to a briefly ringing cell phone scored 25 percent worse on a test of material presented before the distraction.

'True muonium' is a long-theorized but never-seen tiny atom that was first proposed more than 50 years ago.  True muonium, which unlike "muonium" (an atom made of an electron and an anti-muon) is made of a muon and an anti-muon.   Both muons and anti-muons are created frequently in nature when energetic particles from space — cosmic rays — strike the Earth's atmosphere yet their existence is fleeting and their combination, 'true muonium,' decays naturally into other particles in a few trillionths of a second. This has made observation impossible.But it might be observed even in current collider experiments, according to theoretical work published recently by researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Arizona State University.

Like ethanol, the darling of activists who refused to know any better until it was actually implemented and shown to be a disaster, there is a certain amount of marketing hype around CFL bulbs and environmental groups have drunk the Kool-Aid.  All mercury is bad when it comes to kids.   And who knows what those frequencies will do to your pets?   But it may not be an issue for long.   A new laser process says it can double the brightness of incandescent bulbs while using the same amount of energy.    

DHS Begins Test of Biometric Exit Procedures at Two U.S. Airports, the next step toward deploying biometric exit procedures for international travelers.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today began collecting biometrics - digital fingerprints - from non-U.S. citizens departing the United States as part of a pilot program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. Since 2004, biometrics have helped DHS prevent the use of fraudulent documents, protect visitors from identity theft and stop thousands of criminals and immigration violators from entering the United States.
Collecting biometrics allows us to determine faster and more accurately whether non-U.S.