NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander scraped the icy soil of the “Wonderland” area on June 26, confirming that subsurface soil and icy soil can be sampled at a single trench. Now, Phoenix scientists are assured they have a completed the soil-layer ...
Disciplined and observational study of the natural world including, but not limited to: Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Earth Science.
Cell Phone Radiation Alters Human DNA Expression
Mobile phone usage has been associated to a number of diseases; however, causal relations have not been proved yet. A pilot human volunteer study, conducted by the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), has recently revealed that exposure of ...
Magnet Controlled Camera
A team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering in Sankt Ingbert, Germany, led by Dr. Frank Volke, has developed a tiny magnet controlled camera that can take pictures of the upper gastro-intestinal tract. This device is easily controlled from ...
Interferon Based Drug May Eliminate Breast Cancer
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of science in Israel have engineered a new protein they call Interferon-alpha-2, which is an interferon variant with highly increased biological potency as compared with the natural interferon currently used to treat a number of ...
Huge Lenses to Observe Dark Energy
UK astronomers, as a part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect dark energy by completing the shipment of the glass required for the five ...
How Embryonic Stem Cells Become Tissue Specific
It has been unclear for many years how embryonic stem cells develop to their final destination as a specific tissue of the grown organism. Recently, a collaborative research group from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the US National Institutes of ...
The Link between Inflammation and Cancer
A research team from the Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS) at MIT has confirmed that when DNA repair mechanisms are compromised, chronic inflammation expedites intestine cancer in mice. The results suggest that people with a decreased ability to repair ...
One More Meaning of ‘Computer Science’
Can software help scientists deal with the extremely large and fast-growing body of research in their own field? Can it locate relevant studies, tools, and knowledge from other fields? This column describes several ongoing efforts to achieve this goal. Putting ...
Scientists Create Synthesized DNA
DNA, which provides the genetic code for everything from bacteria to blue whales, is composed of combinations of just four units, or bases. Floyd Romesberg, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, along with his team of ...
First Flight for the Google Lunar X PRIZE
The Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association is the first team to submit a due date for sending a robot to the moon in the Google Lunar X competition. The flight will be launched within three months and if the team ...