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 ...

In research that sheds light on the perils of yo-yo dieting and repeated bouts of sugar-bingeing, researchers from The Scripps Research Institute have shown in animal models that cycling between periods of eating sweet and regular-tasting food can activate the brain`s stress system and generate overeating, anxiety, and withdrawal-like symptoms. "When many people diet, they try to avoid fatten...

Before our planets found their way to the stable orbits they circle in today, they wiggled and jostled about like unsettled children. Now, NASA`s Spitzer Space Telescope has found a young star with evidence for the same kind of orbital hyperactivity. Young planets circling the star are thought to be disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust. The ...

People who watch forensic and crime dramas on TV are more likely than non-viewers to have a distorted perception of America`s criminal justice system, according to new research from Purdue University. "These kinds of shows, such as `CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,` `Law & Order,` `Cold Case` and `The Closer,` are some of the most popular programs on television today, so it`s important tha...

Immunologists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Children`s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the have found a unique quirk in the way the immune system fends off bacteria called Francisella tularensis, which could lead to vaccines that are better able to prevent tularemia infection of the lungs. Their findings were published today in the early, online version of Immunity. F. ...

Japanese researchers have developed a computer program which may be able tell from an emergency call if you are about to die. Research published in the open access journal BMC Emergency Medicine shows that a computer algorithm is able to predict the patient`s risk of dying at the time of the emergency call. Kenji Ohshige and a team of researchers from the Yokohama City University School of Medicin...

In new papers appearing this month in Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Illinois biochemistry professor Raven H. Huang and his colleagues describe the first RNA repair system to be discovered in bacteria. This is only the second RNA repair system discovered to date (with two proteins from T4 phage, a virus that attacks bacteria, as the first). The novel...

The first all-sky maps developed by NASA`s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, the initial mission to examine the global interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, suggest that the galactic magnetic fields had a far greater impact on Earth`s history than previously conceived, and the future of our planet and others may depend, in part, on how the galactic magnetic fields...

In a paper published Oct. 15 in Science, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) present a new view of the region of the sun’s influence, or heliosphere, and the forces that shape it. Images from one of the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument’s sensors, the Ion and Neutral Camera (MIMI/INCA), on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggest that the heliosphere may ...

Elderly cancer patients need a combination of treatments tailor-made to their specific needs to successfully combat the disease. The challenge is to boost their immune response to cancer vaccines, because like the rest of our organs, our immune system ages and gradually becomes less efficient as we get older. Dr. Joseph Lustgarten, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in the US, reviews the ef...