Carl Zimmer always has interesting insights on both science and the state of science. As a respected writer with a broad base he is going to survive anything that happens in the future of science media but it's because of his ability to see the future of what will be important in science that earned him that position."As I got more familiar with the microbiome, it became clear to me that scientists won’t be able to handle its complexity without thinking like ecologists" - a multidisciplinary approach few saw coming.  Instead, most people speculated all the important work in biology would be done by physicists.

Vincent Dammai, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, S.C., has been arrested by the FBI for supplying stem cells for use in unapproved stem cell therapies in violation of federal US Food and Drug Administration laws.

UCSF biologists Yuriy Kirichok and Polina Lishko have made a name for themselves recording the electrical currents that course through...sperm cells. They uncovered how progesterone, a hormone involved in menstruation and embryo development , switches on a sperm's internal electricity. The electric current kicks sperm tails into overdrive, powering the final push toward the egg. Sperm that fail to heed progesterone's "get-up-and-go" signal could help explain some couples' struggles to conceive, say Kirichok and Lishko.

The upside to being a communist dictatorship is you can just ban cars for the common folk to lessen pollution when important events are in town, like the Olympics, which makes progressive environmentalists coo with delight but isn't that great for people who have to get to work. The downside is no one really care what happens to people when government is the most important thing, and that means corruption - and therefore yet another food scandal due to indifferent oversight.

A fiery ancient Greek curse inscribed on two sides of a thin lead tablet was about a greengrocer some 1,700 years ago in the city of Antioch, researchers have determined.  The tablet holding the curse was dropped into a well in Antioch, then one of the Roman Empire's biggest cities in the East, today part of southeast Turkey near the border with Syria.

A cave in South Africa contains a bed made of bundles of sedge and wild quince leaves. It was found by archaeologist Lyn Wadley of Wits University while excavating a site at Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal province.

Wadley found the bed, about the size of a modern twin bed, buried over nine feet deep in sediments inside a rock shelter on a cliff face on the banks of the Thongathi river, 20 north of Durban. Wadley has been working there since 1998.

The bed was covered with a layer of aromatic leaves from a plant called the river wild quince. No other tree leaves were found on the bedding, so the leaves were not there as a result of random leaf fall, the report said.

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today released a new oversight report, “Wastebook 2011” that highlights over $6.5 billion in examples of some of the most egregious ways our taxpayer dollars were wasted - 100 of the countless unnecessary, duplicative and low-priority projects spread throughout the federal government while the money for extending jobless benefits to the millions of Americans who are still out of work can't be found.What made his annual list?• $75,000 for an awareness campaign about the role Michigan plays in producing Christmas trees&poinsettias.

At various times in Earth history, single-celled organisms threw their lot in with each other to become larger and multicellular, resulting, for instance, in the riotous diversity of animals. However, fossil evidence of these major evolutionary transitions is extremely rare.

This week presents a rare opportunity to see all the major planets of the solar system in a single night.Just after sunset tonight (Dec. 21) the two brightest planets will be shining, weather permitting. Venus, the brightest, rides low in the southwest just above the setting sun. Jupiter, the second brightest planet, is high in the south.At 5 p.m. tonight, Dec. 21, Venus and Jupiter dominate the sky; Uranus and Neptune are visible between them with a small telescope.

At Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, Ken Regan tackles what the statistical nuance of 'evidence' means in the latest Higgs disclosure, delving into statistics and social convention in a hard science (actually, he puts "hard science" in quotes, though I am not sure why - perhaps he thinks 'hard' is the colloquial version, like 'difficult' so he doesn't want to annoy social fields) such as particle physics and whether the assumptions behind the confidence intervals can be violated on both sides: by humans owing to unexpected selection bias, and by Nature possibly acting like a cheating prover in an interactive protocol.