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Venus is uninhabitable for humans yet from a distance, using statistical wobbles, a Venus-like planet and an Earth-like planet are very similar.

While the Earth has oceans of water and relatively moderate temperatures, Venus has no liquid
water and exists in a runaway greenhouse scenario where the levels of carbon dioxide are so high that the atmosphere traps all the heat. The planet is torrid but it is 95 percent the size of Earth. Right now, size is what astronomers are looking for when searching for exoplanets but size alone is not a distinguishing characteristic when sorting for a habitable one. 

A protein called Nrf2,continually moves in and out of the nuclei of human cells to sense the cell's health and vitality and when Nrf2 is exposed to threats to the cell's health, it oscillates faster and activates an increase in the cell's defense mechanism, including raising the levels of antioxidants.

The public has long suffered from green fatigue, where constant doomsday prophecies by environmental groups have become background noise, but there is good news too. It just has to come from the world of science instead.
After the detection of the ozone-depleting properties of  chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) in the 1970s, data from satellite measurements in 1985 were startling; a huge hole had been discovered over the Antarctic in the ozone layer that protects the Earth from dangerous, carcinogenic UV rays and it was unclear how much was natural and what had been caused by man.

What do leopards in India do when prowling at night? Like with smaller domestic cats in America, evidence from a GoPro video around their necks would probably horrify pet owners, but scat samples for leopards in India's Ahmednagar's district in Maharashtra tell the story.
Leopards mostly eat dogs, it turns out. 
87 percent of their diet was made up of domestic animals, according to  a new study led by the Wildlife Conservation Society. And that was mostly pets dog. 39 percent was man's best friend and 15 percent were even other cats. 17 percent was assorted wild animals including rodents, monkeys, and mongoose, and birds.

Quasars are supermassive black holes that live at the center of distant galaxies. They are the most luminous beacons in the sky, and shine across the entire electromagnetic spectrum due to rapidly accreting matter in their gravitationally inescapable centers.
Quasars display a broad range of outward appearances when viewed by astronomers, reflecting the diversity in the conditions of the regions close to their centers. But despite this variety, quasars have a surprising amount of regularity in their quantifiable physical properties, which follow well-defined trends (referred to as the "main sequence" of quasars) discovered more than 20 years ago. 

Objects in space spin, most people know that, but what is less known is that they spin in a way that's totally different from the way they spin on earth.
It comes down to where their centers of mass are, and how their mass is distributed - knowing how things will spin is crucial to any number of actual or potential space missions, from cleaning up debris in the geosynchronous orbit favored by communications satellites to landing a demolition crew on a comet.

The Obama administration recently began claiming that the unemployment rate had dropped to 6.1 percent, evidence that its economic policies were working. Yet over 90 Americans of working age are unemployed or working at low paying jobs outside their fields. How can they both be correct? 
Estimating the unemployment rate has become more difficult than in the past - because the definition of unemployment has changed and so has the design of metrics to track it. Millions of people cannot get unemployment benefits because they have been out of work too long, for example. To the government, that means they are not unemployed, even though they clearly are. Others have taken part-time jobs. 

VFH and UFH portions of the radio spectrum are reserved for over the air television broadcasts and the FCC keeps plenty of space between channels to prevent interference.
But unused UHF TV spectrum could be used for fat streams of data over wireless hotspots that could stretch for miles, according to a presentation at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2014 conference.  

Some people avoid risk while others will roll the dice with wealth, health, and safety. Is it just personality? Media influence?
Researchers led by Ifat Levy, assistant professor in comparative medicine and neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine believe that the volume of the parietal cortex in the brain can predict where people fall on the risk-taking spectrum. 

People with blood type AB may be more likely to develop memory loss in later years than people with other blood types, according to a paper in Neurology, but what does that really mean?
AB is the least common blood type, found in about 4 percent of the U.S. population. The study found that people with AB blood were 82 percent more likely to develop the thinking and memory problems that can lead to dementia than people with other blood types.
Previous studies have shown that people with type O blood have a lower risk of heart disease and stroke, factors that can increase the risk of memory loss and dementia but those are based on epidemiological fishing expeditions.  Is there really a link?

A pop song goes that rainy days and Mondays bring people down. There was always some truth to that and a new paper in JAMA quantifies the link between a lack of sunshine and suicide. The authors found that lower rates of suicide are associated with more daily sunshine in the prior 14 to 60 days.
Light interacts with brain serotonin systems and possibly influences serotonin-related behaviors. Those behaviors, such as mood and impulsiveness, can play a role in suicide.

Gibbons are small, tree-living apes from Southeast Asia, many species of which are endangered. They are part of the same superfamily as humans and great apes, but sit on the divide between Old-World monkeys and the great apes.
These creatures have several distinctive traits, such as an unusually large number of chromosomal rearrangements, and different numbers of chromosomes are seen in individual species.
Researchers recently completed analysis of the mobile elements in the gibbon genome. This included the characterization of the mobile genetic element called LAVA. LAVA is made up of pieces of known jumping genes and named after its main components: L1, Alu, and the VA section of SVA mobile elements.