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Reef Fish at Risk as Carbon Dioxide Levels Build

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - Jan. 21 (Special Report) - Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions threaten the survival of some fish species by sending their central nervous systems haywire.' Australian Associated Press

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Lynn Margulis, Trailblazing Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 73

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Bruce Weber - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - Dr. Margulis was a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution.

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From blue whales to earthworms, a common mechanism gives shape to living beings

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, ScienceDaily Staff - Oct. 14 (Research) - Mice don't have tails on their backs, and their ribs don't grow from lumbar vertebrae. And for good reason. Scientists have discovered the mechanism that determines the shape that many animals take -- including humans, blue whales, and insects.

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'Dark matter' of the genome revealed through analysis of 29 mammals

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard, ScienceDaily Staff - Oct. 13 (Research) - An international team of researchers has discovered the vast majority of the so-called "dark matter" in the human genome, by means of a sweeping comparison of 29 mammalian genomes. The team has pinpointed the parts of the human genome that control when and where genes are turned on. This map is a critical step in interpreting the thousands of genetic changes that have been linked to human disease.

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He ANT heavy, he’s my son: Mother shows her strength with a bit of child’s play

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Mail - Sep. 26 (News) - The mighty ant can lift food and building materials 20 times its own bodyweight. But these fascinating photos reveal the softer side of a bug's life.

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Peace of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Charles Q. Choi - Sep. 12 (News Report) - Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely--a sense of being dead, a feeling that one's "soul" has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing. Approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population says they have had a near-death experience, according to a Gallup poll. Near-death experiences are reported across cultures, with written records of them dating back to ancient Greece. Not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death-- one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were. ...

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8.7 million species exist on Earth, study estimates

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - Aug. 23 (News Report) - For centuries scientists have pondered a central question: How many species exist on Earth? Now, a group of researchers has offered an answer: 8.7 million. Although the number is still an estimate, it represents the most rigorous mathematical analysis ye

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Breeding crops with deeper roots could 'slash CO2 levels'

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - Aug. 03 (News) - Writing in the Annals of Botany, Professor Douglas Kell argues that developing crops that produce roots more deeply in the ground could harvest more carbon from the air, and make crops more drought resistant, while dramatically reducing carbon levels.

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Archaeopteryx Knocked From Roost as Original Bird

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Danielle Venton - Jul. 28 (News) - Archaeopteryx’s status as the forerunner of modern birds is crumbling in the face of a new, closely-related fossil. The new discovery, a feathered, chicken-sized dinosaur named Xiaotingia, has prompted a fresh look at the dinosaur family tree, casting Archaeopteryx as a bird-like dinosaur rather than dinosaur-like bird.

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Justice Department Filing Casts Doubt on Guilt of Bruce Ivins, Accused in Anthrax Case

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By by Mike Wiser, PBS FRONTLINE, Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers, Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica This story was co-published with PBS FRONTLINE, McClatchy. WA - Jul. 19 (News Report) - The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago. Shortly after Ivins committed suicide in 2008, federal investigators announced that they had identified him as the mass murderer who sent the letters to members of Congress and the media. The case was circumstantial, with federal officials arguing that the scientist had the means, motive and opportunity to make the deadly powder at a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. On July 15, however, Justice Department lawyers acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab -- the so-called hot suite -- did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001. The government said it continues to believe that Ivins was “more likely than not” the killer. But the filing in a Florida court did not explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that the lab “did not have the specialized equipment’’ in Ivins' secure lab “that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.” The government’s statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI’s eight-year, $100 million investigation never proved he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder. Earlier this year, a report by the National Academy of Science questioned the genetic analysis that had linked a flask of anthrax stored in Ivins’ office to the anthrax contained in the letters. The court papers were uncovered by a reporter for the PBS program FRONTLINE which is working on a forthcoming documentary on the case with McClatchy Newspapers and ProPublica, the investigative newsroom. They were filed by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Division who are defending the government against a wrongful death suit brought by the family of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun. Stevens was the first to die from a tainted letter and his family has accused federal officials of lax procedures that allowed someone to make a germ weapon using anthrax from a government laboratory. In asserting that Ivins was culprit, criminal investigators pointed to his access to the specialized equipment at the laboratory. Officials drew up elaborate charts showing that Ivins’ time in the hot suites spiked in the weeks before the letters were mailed. But Ivins’ colleagues have said in depositions for the Stevens case that the powder could not have been made in the lab without sickening lab technicians and others who had not been vaccinated against anthrax. A Justice Department spokesman Monday shed little light on the seeming shift in positions, saying that investigators still believe Ivins produced the anthrax at Fort Detrick and are unaware of evidence that he did so elsewhere. The Justice Department filed the papers in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., last week. The lawyers were attempting to counter allegations by the Stevens family of negligence at Fort Detrick, including inadequate controls over anthrax controls, by arguing that the anthrax in the letters wasn't produced there. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said Monday that the court filing did not contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. Rather, he said, the lawyers merely argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors’’ because he did not have equipment to dry the spores in his containment laboratory. Boyd said this meant the United States should not be held liable for his actions.” “To clarify, this statement was intended to relate to the specific containment laboratory” where Ivins kept a flask of liquid anthrax with genetic markers similar to those found in the letters, Boyd said. In excerpts from one of more than a dozen depositions made public in the case last week, the current chief of of the Bacteriology Division at the Army laboratory, Patricia Worsham, said it lacked the facilities in 2001 to make the kind of spores in the letters. Two of the five letters, those sent to Democratic U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Thomas Daschle of South Dakota, were especially deadly, because they were so buoyant as to float with the slightest wisp of air. Worsham said that the lab’s equipment for drying the spores, a machine the size of a refrigerator, was not in containment. “If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and we had non-immunized personnel in that area, and I would have expected some of them to become ill,” she said. In its statement of facts, the government lawyers also said that producing the volume of anthrax in the letters would have required 2.8 to 53 liters of the solution used to grow the spores or 463 to 1,250 Petri dishes. Colleagues of Ivins at the lab have asserted that he couldn’t have grown all that anthrax without their noticing it. The government’s own summary of the case against Ivins, released early last year when the Justice Department formally closed its investigation, noted that “drying anthrax is expressly forbidden by various treaties,” and “overt use of any of these methods, if noticed, would have raised considerable alarm and scrutiny.’’ Paul Kemp, Ivins’ lead defense attorney, said Monday that the department’s concession that the equipment wasn’t available “is at direct variance to the assertions of the government on July 29, 2008,” the day Ivins died, thus “invalidating one of the chief theories of their prosecution case.” Kemp said that government officials told him and a colleague, Tom DeGonia, that the FBI could “prove that Dr. Ivins manufactured the dried spores used in the anthrax attacks, and would prove this by the records of his presence in the hot suites in August and September. Anthrax is one of the deadliest biological weapons. Once inhaled, the tiny spores germinate inside the human body, producing rapidly multiplying, highly toxic bacteria that, if untreated, typically kill a person within days. The anthrax mailings came as a second shock to the nation just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beginning Sept. 18, 2001, the perpetrator sent at least five letters containing anthrax powder to three media outlets and to the offices of Sens. Leahy and Daschle. Two postal workers, a nurse and an elderly woman in Connecticut also died, some 32,000 congressional and postal employees took long-term antibiotic treatments and teams wearing moon suits spent months cleansing a Senate office building and large postal facility of the deadly spores.

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The Optimism Bias

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Ali Sharot - Jul. 02 (Special Report) - We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more). The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grownups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.

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What's the Future of Synthetic Biology?

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Katherine Bourzac - Jun. 20 (News) - Last July, scientists created the first " synthetic cell ," an organism that's controlled by a chemically synthesized genome edited on a computer and stitched together in the lab. One year later, biologists at the Fifth Annual Synthetic Biology conference at Stanford University are still struggling to take the next step in the field.

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‘Worms from hell’ unearth possibilities for extraterrestrial life

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Marc Kaufman - Jun. 02 (News Report) - Scientists have found complex, multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planetâ€™s surface â€“ raising new possibilities about life on Earth and other planets and moons.

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Environmental groups challenge Shell drilling plan

Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Harry R. Weber - May. 31 (News Report) - Environmental groups asked a federal appeals court Thursday to throw out a U.S. government decision to approve a Shell oil exploration plan that involves five proposed wells under more than 7,000 feet (2,133 meters) of water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement approved the plan in May. The plan also includes three previously approved wells 72 miles (115 kilometers) off Louisiana. Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council claim in a petition filed in the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta that the decision violates the law and that the environment would be harmed if it stands.

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Bubbling sea signals coral threat

Sun, 29 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - By Richard Black - May. 29 (News) - Findings from a "natural laboratory" in seas off Papua New Guinea suggest that acidifying oceans will severely hit coral reefs by the end of the century.

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After Osama bin Laden’s death, imagining a world without DNA evidence

Sat, 14 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Brandon L. Garrett - May. 14 (Opinion) - How did the United States make sure that Osama bin Laden was dead? Facial-recognition software offered only 95 percent certainty. To be 99.9 percent sure, according to federal officials, it took DNA testing.

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The evolutionary tree of fungi grows a new branch

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Nature.com - By Marian Turner - May. 11 (News Report) - .....and his colleagues have called the fungi the cryptomycota, or 'hidden fungi,' because they have remained undiscovered until now, despite being present in common environments.

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Is It Ever OK To Drink Your Own Urine?

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Popular Science - By Ryan Bradley - Apr. 21 (Research) - Not really, but urine has been a faddish health drink for centuries nonetheless. Drinking urine for survival is even more harmful, since dehydration makes it less dilute and all those electrolytes and acids appear in greater concentration, making a bad situation worse. Also, it’s gross.

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How antidepressants boost growth of new brain cells

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Jessica Hamzelou - Apr. 17 (News Report) - The first clear evidence of how antidepressant drugs help to boost brain cell formation could lead to better treatments for depression. The hippocampus is one of just two brain regions known to grow new neurons throughout life - a process called neurogenesis. This process is disrupted in people with depression, although it is not known whether this is a cause or symptom of the condition. It is clear, however, that one of the ways that antidepressants work is by boosting neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Christoph Anacker and his colleagues at King's College London have now worked out how they do so. Previous research has shown a link between some antidepressants and stress hormones called glucocorticoids. So Anacker's team decided to test whether the antidepressant sertraline acts on the glucocorticoid receptors of brain cells. They grew human hippocampal progenitor cells in a dish and added sertraline. Ten days later, the cultures showed a 25 per cent greater than expected increase in the number of new neurons.

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How the Penis Lost Its Spikes: Scientific American

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Zoë Corbyn - Mar. 16 (News) - Humans ditched DNA to evolve smooth penises and bigger brains.

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Big Win for Biotech: USDA Deregulates Monsanto Alfalfa

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Mike Ludwig - Feb. 07 (Special Report) - , the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has fully deregulated Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa that is genetically modified (GM) to be resistant to Roundup herbicide. The decision squashed a proposed compromise between the biotech industry and its opponents that would have placed geographic restrictions on Roundup Ready alfalfa to prevent organic and traditional alfalfa from being contaminated by herbicide sprays and transgenes spread by cross-pollination and other factors.read more

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Flu breakthrough promises a vaccine to kill all strains

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Alok Jha - Feb. 07 (News) - Scientists at Oxford University have successfully tested a universal flu vaccine that could work against all known strains of the illness, taking a significant step in the fight against a disease that affects billions of people each year.

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Spiderman on Broadway? ‘Been There, Done That,’ Say Ants

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Miller-McCune - By Michael Todd - Jan. 24 (Interview) - Insect biologist Rob Dunn has uncovered a hot spot of insect biodiversity.

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Mass Extinction of Scientists Who Study Species

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Craig McClain - Jan. 19 (News Analysis) - Scientists who classify, describe and examine the relationships between organisms are themselves going extinct. The millions of dollars spent globally on technology to catalog species may actually be pushing out the people we rely upon: taxonomists and systematists.

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A cure for AIDS?

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

cosmos Magazine - By Jon Cohen - Dec. 16 (Special Report) - Researchers are pursuing radical new ways to control the infection entirely.

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