Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent. In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 20...

Is there such a thing as "weather" on Mars? There are some doubts, considering the planet`s atmosphere is only 1 percent as dense as that of the Earth. Mars, however, definitely has clouds, drastically low temperatures and out-of-this-world dust storms. Istvan Szunyogh, a Texas A&M professor of atmospheric sciences, was recently awarded a NASA grant to analyze and forecast Martian we...

A Kansas State University study has shown that when preparing frozen foods, adolescents are less likely than adults to wash their hands and are more susceptible to cross-contaminating raw foods while cooking. "While half of the adults we observed washed their hands after touching raw chicken, none of the adolescents did," said Casey Jacob, a food safety research assistant at K-State. &qu...

On the morning of November 13, mission controllers confirmed that ESA`s comet chaser Rosetta had swung by Earth at 8:45 CET as planned, skimming past our planet to pick up a gravitational boost for an epic journey to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta passed over the ocean, just South of the Indonesian island of Java, at exactly 08:45:40 CET, at a speed of 13.34 km/s ...

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have shown that fat collection in different body locations, such as around the heart and the aorta and within the liver, are associated with certain decreased heart functions. The study, which appears online in Obesity, also found that measuring a person`s body mass index (BMI) does not reliably predict the amount of undesired fat in and...

The most extensive DNA study to-date of Africa`s rarest monkey reveals that the species had an intriguing sexual past. Of the last two remaining populations of the recently discovered kipunji, one population shows evidence of past mating with baboons while the other does not, says a new study in Biology Letters. The results may help to set conservation priorities for this critically endangered spe...

An important, ground-breaking initiative is unfolding in the global critical care community in response to the H1N1 pandemic. While front-line health care workers and infectious disease experts around the world are working round the clock to control, treat and prevent H1N1 infection, those who deal with the most severely ill patients — physicians working in hospital intensive care units (ICU...

Carbon is usually typecast as a villain in terms of the environment but researchers at the University of Warwick have devised a novel way to miniaturise a technology that will make carbon a key material in some extremely green heating products for our homes and in air conditioning equipment for our cars. Most domestic heating and automotive air conditioning requires a lot of energy. Domestic space...

Schepens Eye Research Institute scientists have found that–when tested in a driving simulator–patients with hemianopia (blindness in one half of the visual field in both eyes) have significantly more difficulty detecting pedestrians (on their blind side) than normally sighted people. These results, published in the November 2009 issue of Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, ...

Researchers in Egypt have developed a technique to compress DNA sequences of the kind used in medical research so that they take up a lot less space in a computer database but without loss of information. The approach is described in detail in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications. Molecular sequence databases, such as those at EMBL, GenBank, ...