American Scientist Online

Antarctic Lake Success 'Uncertain'

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:44:00 EST

It is not yet clear whether Russian scientists have succeeded in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok. National media on Monday reported a breakthrough into the lake, the largest of more than 300 bodies of liquid water buried under Antarctica's ice...

from BBC News Online

Prehistoric Life Forms Speak From Gooey Graves

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:42:00 EST

Los Angeles -- No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso's works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most exquisitely preserved fossils in the world?

from the San Francisco Chronicle

Jurassic Cricket's Song Recreated

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:40:00 EST

Night-time in the Jurassic forest was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chirping bush crickets. This is according to scientists who have reconstructed the song of a cricket that chirped 165 million years ago...

from BBC News Online

Piltdown Man: British Archaeology's Greatest Hoax

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:38:00 EST

In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London's Natural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic's precise chemical make-up...

from the Guardian (UK)

Sacrificing the Desert to Save the Earth

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:36:00 EST

Ivanpah Valley, Calif.-- Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket...

from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

Plucking a Strand of Genetic Insight From the Sea

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:33:00 EST

By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years...

from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Lead Remains Condors' Major Obstacle

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:30:00 EST

The San Diego Zoo made conservation history 30 years ago by adopting a California condor chick and raising it at what is now the Safari Park. The known free-ranging population at the time was 22 birds--a number that fell to zero in 1987 when the last wild condor was taken captive in hopes of preventing extinction...

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

Drug Bests Cystic-Fibrosis Mutation

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:28:00 EST

In a blinded clinical trial, neither the patient nor the clinician should know who is receiving placebo and who the active drug. But during a trial of Kalydeco (ivacaftor), a cystic-fibrosis treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on 31 January, Drucy Borowitz says it was sometimes easy to tell the difference...

from Nature News

Plants Swap Chloroplasts Via Grafts

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:26:00 EST

Plants of different species can swap chloroplasts, the little cellular factories that capture energy from sunlight, when stems graft together. The surprising discovery may explain why evolutionary histories based on chloroplasts sometimes disagree with those based on other sources of DNA...

from Science News

Evolving Bigger Bodies Takes Longer Than Getting Small, Study Says

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:24:00 EST

Some mammals need roughly 24 million generations to go from mouse-size to elephant-size, a new study says...

from National Geographic News

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