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How social or altruistic behavior evolved has been a central and hotly debated question, particularly by those researchers engaged in the study of social insect societies of ants, bees and wasps.

Parkinson disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease characterized by the selective loss of midbrain dopaminergic neurons.
Although the cause of PD is unknown, pathological analyses have suggested the involvement of oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Recently, an inherited form of early-onset PD has been linked to mutations in both copies of the gene encoding the mitochondrial protein PINK1. Furthermore, increasing evidence indicates that single-copy mutations in PINK1 are a significant risk factor in the development of later-onset PD.

With a technology transfer agreement announced today, the first compact proton therapy system – one that would fit in any major cancer center and cost a fifth as much as a full-scale machine – is one step closer to reality.
Proton therapy is considered the most advanced form of radiation therapy available, but size and cost have limited the technology’s use to only six cancer centers nationwide.

Compact proton radiotherapy treatment concept
Illustration by Steven Hawkins

A team of LLNL researchers has conceptually proven that a three-in-one machine, or “universal point detection system,” that can detect explosive, chemical and biological agents all at the same time, can be achieved, said George Farquar, a postdoctoral fellow and physical chemist at the LLNL’s Glenn T. Seaborg Institute.

Audrey Martin adjusts the lens stack of SPAMS. Martin, who worked at LLNL for 15 weeks last summer as a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Fellow, is the first DHS intern hired into the Laboratory as a full-time student employee.

At some level, all types of matter that we usually deal with have at least one thing in common - they're made of particles. The solids, liquids, gases and plasmas that surround us are built of atoms, which are made of electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons in turn are made of quarks.
According to Harvard University's Howard Georgi, however, there's at least the theoretical possibility that some matter in the universe is not made of particles at all. Georgi has dubbed the mind-bending matter "unparticle stuff," and hopes that we may see signs of it at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a super high energy proton collider due to come online in Europe later this year.

Alan Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer collect snow-depth data for ESA's CryoSat-2 mission. They're seasoned polar explorers so they are used to dealing with physically demanding and downright harsh conditions but what they encountered during their three and a half-month expedition from Russia to Greenland via the North Pole was dangerous even for them.
They didn't expect that the Lincoln Sea in the Arctic Ocean, the very ice they were on, would begin to disintegrate. Aside from the dangerous conditions they also had to circumnavigate the ice-free water leads.

Scientists at University College Cork have discovered that probiotic bacteria can protect against bacterial infection. The work was carried out in the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) in UCC.
The APC, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, was set up investigate the beneficial roles of the bacteria found in the gastro-intestine of healthy humans.
The research group examined a range of beneficial bacteria and found one specific probiotic bacterium (Lactobacillus salivarius UCC118) which was able to kill Listeria monocytogenes, an often lethal pathogen in pregnant women. The probiotic kills the pathogen by producing an antibiotic-like compound called a bacteriocin.

Engineers at Purdue University are developing robots able to make "educated guesses" about what lies ahead as they traverse unfamiliar surroundings, reducing the amount of time it takes to successfully navigate those environments.
The method works by using a new software algorithm that enables a robot to create partial maps as it travels through an environment for the first time. The robot refers to this partial map to predict what lies ahead.
The more repetitive the environment, the more accurate the prediction and the easier it is for the robot to successfully navigate, said C.S.

Using a new computational method called NetworKIN, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital, MIT and EMBL can now use biological networks to better identify relationships between molecules, including regulation of protein networks that will ultimately help to target human disease.
“Our method works a bit like getting a recommendation from Amazon,” says Dr. Peer Bork, group leader at EMBL. “The fact that certain books have been bought by the same customers tells you that they have something in common. In the same way biological networks tell us about shared features between different proteins. These help us predicting which kinases are likely to act on them.”

Samuel Isaac Weissman, a professor and chemist who helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, has died, his wife said Friday. He was 94.
Weissman died Tuesday in St. Louis. His wife, Jane Loevinger, said a cause of death was not known.

A specimen of the Wollemi pine, an Australian conifer and one of the world's oldest tree species, has been donated to Bergianska Garden at Stockholm University in Sweden.
The Wollemi was discovered on September 10, 1994, in an isolated valley in Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, about 150 km northwest of Sydney. It is estimated to be about 200 million years old, from earth's Jurassic Period, so it was around even before the Australian continent was formed.

Wollemi Pine sample

Humans have yet to see Earth's center, as did the characters in Jules Verne's science fiction classic, "Journey to the Center of the Earth." But a new NASA study proposes a novel technique to pinpoint more precisely the location of Earth's center of mass and how it moves through space.
Knowing the location of the center of mass, determined using measurements from sites on Earth's surface, is important because it provides the reference frame through which scientists determine the relative motions of positions on Earth's surface, in its atmosphere and in space.