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Dolphins and seals have had eons to adapt to aquatic life, but they can still be taxed while pushing the boundaries, according to a paper in Nature Communications which found a surprisingly high frequency of heart arrhythmias in bottlenose dolphins and Weddell seals - at least during their deepest dives. 

Two miles below the surface of the ocean, researchers have discovered new microbes that "breathe" sulfate. These microbes, which have yet to be classified and named, exist in massive undersea aquifers -- networks of channels in porous rock beneath the ocean where water continually churns.
About one-third of the Earth's biomass is thought to exist in this largely uncharted environment.
Sulfate is a compound of sulfur and oxygen that occurs naturally in seawater. It is used commercially in everything from car batteries to bath salts and can be aerosolized by the burning of fossil fuels, increasing the acidity of the atmosphere.

Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn't actually commit. The new work provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years. The research in Psychological Science indicates that the participants came to internalize the stories they were told, providing rich and detailed descriptions of events that never actually took place.

In 1973, during a symposium to celebrate the 500th birthday of Copernicus, Brandon Carter, a post-doctoral researcher in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, tweaked his audience by stating that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe - the exact opposite of what scientists from Copernicus on have said.Since then, it has gone in and out of fashion, and the Anthropic Principle, as it was called, was most recently embraced in some M-Theory flavors of string theory.

The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000, which continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York.In a separate analysis of the raw data, NOAA scientists also found 2014 to be the warmest on record. They conclude that 2014 ranks as Earth's warmest since 1880. Since then, Earth's average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius), a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide and other human emissions into the planet's atmosphere. The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has been hobbled by the loss of critical guidance systems but can still find good stuff - most recently a star with three planets only slightly larger than Earth, one in the "Goldilocks" zone, a region where surface temperatures could be moderate enough for liquid water and therefore perhaps life as we know it, to exist.EPIC 201367065, is a cool red M-dwarf star about half the size and mass of our own sun. It is 150 light years, making it among the top 10 nearest stars known to have transiting planets. The star's proximity means it's bright enough for astronomers to study the planets' atmospheres to determine whether they are like Earth's atmosphere and possibly conducive to life.

The Beagle-2 Mars lander,hitched a ride on ESA’s Mars Express mission in 2003 and was released from the mothership on December 19th with a planned landing 6 days later.  Then it was lost. Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Odyssey found nothing. But now the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found it on the surface.  The good news is engineers now know that at least the entry, descent and landing sequence worked and it did indeed successfully 'land' on Mars on Christmas Day 2003. Beagle-2 was less than 2 meters across when fully deployed so catching sight of it was right at the limit of the resolution of cameras in orbit around Mars.

Using simulation, such as wearing a blindfold while performing everyday tasks, has negative effects on people's perceptions of the visually impaired, according to a recent paper.
In one part of the study, after simulating blindness by having their eyes covered, participants believed people who are blind are less capable of work and independent living than did participants who simulated other impairments like amputation, or had no impairment.

There is a gender gap in some fields of academia. Some are skewed heavily toward women and some are skewed heavily toward men, though some have too little variation to be meaningful.But why are there any gaps at all? Various explanations have been offered, from the bizarre - sexism among the liberals who dominate academia - to the more bizarre - the belief among those same academic leaders that women are less analytical than men. The most popular explanation is that women are the only gender that can give birth and after that they work less hours and that penalizes them in faculty and tenure hiring. Family-friendly policy is the only area of academia where people wish it was more like the corporate world.

Last week's terrorist attacks in Paris were religiously-based and they have brought to the fore an issue that France, and most of Europe, had chosen to ignore: determining how prevalent religious fundamentalism is.A new paper says that creating Muslim zones where outsiders were not allowed is not the problem, nor is Muslim hostility toward 'out groups', like non-Muslims, and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office by the terrorists was not even attacking people who made fun of religion, or even western religion, it was instead an attack on the religious values of peace-loving Muslims, according to sociologist  Ruud Koopmans, director of the WZB Berlín Social Science Centre in Germany, writing in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Most people know that our biological functions use a circadian system comprised of a central clock located deep within the center of our brains and multiple clocks located in different parts of the body.   When people fly to the other part of the world or work a night shift, those different biological clocks have not adjusted and so we get things like 'jet lag'. A small study may open new therapeutic avenues for improving the synchronization of the body's different biological clocks.  

A new white paper finds little to no evidence for the effectiveness of opioid drugs in the treatment of long-term chronic pain, despite the explosive recent growth in the use of such drugs. The paper, which constitutes the final report of a seven-member panel convened by the
National Institutes of Health
 last September, finds that many of the studies used to justify the prescription of these drugs were either poorly conducted or of an insufficient duration. That makes prolific use of these drugs surprising, says Dr. David Steffens, chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Connecticut and one of the authors of the study. When it comes to long-term pain, he says, "there's no research-based evidence that these medicines are helpful."