Science In The News Daily

At a Train Trench, an Archaeological Treasure Trove

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:48:00 EST

Archaeologist Deanna Jones couldn't believe her eyes as she hunched over a shallow pit dug next to railroad tracks in front of the San Gabriel Mission...

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Transplant Jaw Made by 3-D Printer

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:46:00 EST

A 3-D printer-created lower jaw has been fitted to an 83-year-old woman's face in what doctors say is the first operation of its kind...

from BBC News Online

Giant Crack in Antarctica About to Spawn NY-Size Iceberg

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:44:00 EST

With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say...

from National Geographic News

Does the Milky Way Galaxy Have an Evil Twin?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:42:00 EST

An uncanny twin of our own Milky Way galaxy takes center stage in a new cosmic portrait by the Hubble Space Telescope...

from the Christian Science Monitor

Primed for Addiction?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:41:00 EST

Families hand down many things from one generation to the next--and addiction can be one of them. A child of drug-addicted parents is eight times more likely to become an addict than a child growing up in a drug-free home. But genes aren't everything. Even in families whose very brains seem primed for addiction, some children still go on to lead productive lives free of drugs, according to new research...

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Emblems of Awareness

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:38:00 EST

Humankind's sharpest minds have figured out some of nature's deepest secrets. Why the sun shines. How humans evolved from single-celled life. Why an apple falls to the ground. Humans have conceived and built giant telescopes that glimpse galaxies billions of light-years away and microscopes that illuminate the contours of a single atom. Yet the peculiar quality that enabled such flashes of scientific insight and grand achievements remains a mystery: consciousness...

from Science News

Is Russia the Birthplace of Native Americans?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:36:00 EST

Native Americans originated from a small mountainous region in southern Siberia, new genetic research shows. The work is the most targeted study yet to suggest a genetic "homeland" for North America's indigenous peoples, according to the authors...

from National Geographic News

How to Overhaul the Way Buildings Use Energy

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:34:00 EST

PHILADELPHIA -- When the Allies needed a weapon terrible enough to end World War II, scientists devised the atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union hurled Sputnik into space, American scientists rallied to build the world's top space program...

from Scientific American

Boisjoly Saw Danger in Space Shuttle

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:32:00 EST

Six months before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle's huge rocket boosters could fail...

from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

Robots Encountering Socks

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:30:00 EST

Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls "Apprentice Robots." They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given "perception mechanisms" to analyze what they've seen, then "planning and simulation" mechanisms, to copy tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn...

from NPR

Sugar May Be Bad, But Is the Alternative Worse?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:21:00 EST

A controversial proposal would regulate sugar as a toxic substance, and not simply because it's a calorie-rich enabler of obesity. Some researchers say it's intrinsically dangerous, not unlike alcohol or tobacco, with unique properties that set off a hormonal cascade ending in higher risks of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.

from Wired Science

Isotopes Hint at North Korean Nuclear Test

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:20:00 EST

North Korea may have conducted two covert nuclear weapons tests in 2010, according to a fresh analysis of radioisotope data.

from Nature News

Children's Books Increasingly Ignore Natural World

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:19:00 EST

Picture an illustrated children's book--one that has won a prestigious award--and your mind conjures up images of furry animals, puffy clouds, and eager boys and girls enjoying adventures in the wild.

from Miller-McCune

Rainbow Retinas & Fiery Cosmic Webs: Winning Images Turn Science into Art

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:18:00 EST

From the dark-matter web of the universe to the rainbow of a mouse's retina, a new trove of award-winning science images reveals little-seen worlds.

from Live Science

Female Frontrunners

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:17:00 EST

Excelling in industry is not easy, especially if you're a woman. According to a 2010 study of New England biotech firms, females comprised only about 12 percent of biotech founders, despite earning about half of the biological science PhDs. And women are equally underrepresented at the senior management level, holding just 12 percent of senior executive positions in the world's top drug companies and 22 percent of the senior management jobs in biotech, according to a 2007 report in Pharmaceutical Executive.

from the Scientist

Tick Tally Reveals Lyme Disease Risk

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:16:00 EST

Roll call for bloodsuckers. Vampires, step back. For four years, researchers combed through hundreds of state parks and bushy areas looking for the culprit responsible for Lyme disease. The black-legged tick, also known as a deer tick, transmits the disease through a bite.

from NPR

Scientific Publishing: The Price of Information

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:15:00 EST

Sometimes it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr. Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics's equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.

from the Economist

Malaria Death Toll Disputed

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:15:00 EST

Researchers are questioning results from a high-profile paper suggesting that malaria may kill twice as many people worldwide as previously estimated.

from Nature News

Air Guns Shake Up Earthquake Monitoring

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:11:00 EST

Petroleum geologists have long used air guns in their search for oil and gas deposits. Sudden blasts from the devices generate seismic waves that they use to map underground rock formations. Could the same technique be used to study earthquakes? A team of Chinese scientists thinks so. The researchers have designed an air gun that could be useful in monitoring changes in stress buildup along fault zones.

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Super-Earth Spotted in Life-Friendly Zone

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:10:00 EST

Inching ever closer toward the goal of finding another Earth, scientists have announced the most promising extraterrestrial incubator so far: a planet of at least 4.5 Earth masses, orbiting its star in the region where liquid water can stably exist.

from Science News