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EL PASO, Texas -- U.S. Border Patrol agents have shot a man authorities describe as a suspected drug smuggler in the New Mexico desert west of Santa Teresa. ...

Pioneer spacecraft mystery may be laid to rest 14:30 15 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Valerie Jamieson, St Louis What is making NASA's twin Pioneer spacecraft mysteriously drift off course, apparently defying the laws of physics? A rigorous new analysis suggests ordinary heat emission can at least partly explain the wayward probes' strange trajectories.Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in the early 1970s and explored the outer solar system. But in 1980, mission scientists noticed that the spacecraft have unexpectedly drifted off course.Both spacecraft have been pulled a little harder than expected towards the sun, and since their launch, they...

FEATURE Is Peer Review Broken? Submissions are up, reviewers are overtaxed, and authors are lodging complaint after complaint about the process at top-tier journals. What's wrong with peer review? BY ALISON MCCOOK Peter Lawrence, a developmental biologist who is also an editor at the journal Development and former editorial board member at Cell, has been publishing papers in academic journals for 40 years. His first 70 or so papers were "never rejected," he says, but that's all changed. Now, he has significantly more trouble getting articles into the first journal he submits them to."The rising [rejections] means an increase...

The best evidence to use against an opponent in a dispute is the evidence the opponent provides. It cannot be rationally disputed by the opponent. Kerry has on his website many documents outlining his military service. There are many unusual and odd things in those records. For instance: The "V" device on the Silver Star Medal on his DD 214 not removed by a DD 215 submitted in 2001 The four campaign stars added by a DD 215 in 2001 The 16+ hour difference in the DTG of Kerry's casualty report compared to the other casualties from the 13 Mar...

DNA left overs, new mechanism for evolution Friday, 16-Jul-2004, by News-Medical   A team of researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has discovered that transposons, small DNA sequences that travel through the genomes, can silence the genes adjacent to them by inducing a molecule called antisense RNA. This is a new mechanism for evolution that has been unknown until now. Transposons are repeated DNA sequences that move through the genomes. For a long time they have been considered as a useless part of genetic material, DNA left overs. However, it is more and more clear that transposons...

http://www.defendamerica.mil/images/photos/jun2004/articles/ai062504b1.jpg Sgt. Charles Bohner, a squad leader with Battery C, Task Force 2-11 Field Artillery, hands out candy to Kharabrud children at the conclusion of the health clinic and school ground breaking ceremonies, May 31, 2004. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Sean Kimmons Task Force Improves Life in Iraqi Village By U.S. Army Spc. Sean Kimmons / 25th Infantry Division KHARABRUD, Iraq, June 25, 2004 — It had to be an exciting day for the people of this small village when soldiers of Task Force 2-11 Field Artillery, 96th Civil Affairs Battalion and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps came here...

No evolution for Italian teens Scientists, teachers shocked by plan to cut evolutionary teaching in secondary school | By Rossella Lorenzi Tens of thousands of Italians have expressed their disagreement with a plan by the minister of education, universities, and research, Letizia Moratti, to ban the teaching of evolutionary theory to young teenagers.Fearing the measure will pave the way for creationist teaching, more than 40,000 citizens—and the number is still increasing—have subscribed a petition launched last week by some of the country's top scientists through the daily La Repubblica.The document, signed by Nobel laureates Rita Levi Montalcini and Renato Dulbecco,...

DNA 'Computer' Able to Detect Cancer By CHRIS KAHNAssociated Press Writer April 28, 2004, 1:29 PM EDT Researchers have developed a vanishingly tiny "computer" that could someday enable doctors to treat cancer and other diseases from inside the body. The molecular-scale device, which is essentially a liquid mixture of synthetic DNA and enzymes, is designed to sniff out chemical signs of disease and pump out drugs in response. In a new study, researchers say it showed promising results in a test tube. Ehud Shapiro of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, who led the team of computer experts and biochemists that...

Molecules of life come in wavesCompounds found in cells show quantum behaviour.5 September 2003PHILIP BALL A wave-like particle can pass through both slots in a barrier. © SPL Physicists have watched biological molecules become waves in a dramatic demonstration of the effects of quantum mechanics1.It's not clear that biological molecules act like quantum waves in this way as they go about their business in living cells. However, physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK, and psychologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona in Tucson have proposed that consciousness might arise from wave-like quantum-mechanical effects involving protein...

Eggs made from embryosReprogramming step towards safer reproductive cloning.2 May 2003TOM CLARKE Stem cells give rise to every part of the body. © K. Hübner & H. Schöler. By tweaking the chemical conditions in a test tube, researchers have for the first time coaxed stem cells from an embryo to produce a clutch of eggs1.The step offers scientists a new way to probe the genetic programming of the cells that give rise to every part of the body. The achievement also paves the way for creating sperm or eggs for infertile couples.As concluded at a discussion at this week's...

The Captain Kirk Principle Intuition is the key to knowing without knowing how you know By Michael Shermer   1   2   next » Image: BRAD HINES Stardate: 1672.1. Earthdate: October 6, 1966. Star Trek, Episode 5, "The Enemy Within." Captain James T. Kirk has just beamed up from planet Alpha 177, where magnetic anomalies have caused the transporter to malfunction, splitting Kirk into two beings. One is cool and rational. The other is impulsive and irrational. Rational Kirk must make a command decision to save the crew, but he is paralyzed with indecision, bemoaning to Dr. McCoy: "I...

Going against the flowHeat can flow without temperature differences - but thermodynamics remains intact.25 June 2002PHILIP BALL With the right rachet, heat can flow from one hot place to another © Getty Images Physicists have devised a way to dodge one of the most fundamental laws of nature: the fact that heat flows only from hot to cold. At face value, it implies they have invented a never-ending source of energy. Well they haven't - but it could provide a method for carrying out unheard-of chemical reactions.By imagining two chambers containing particles, Souvik Das of St Stephen's College in...

Life can go on foreverAn accelerating universe does not have to fry life.27 May 2002PHILIP BALLLife can carry on indefinitely. Physicists in the United States have come to the comforting conclusion that just because the universe is accelerating as it expands, this does not necessarily sound the death knell for life in the far future1, as some have claimed2. There's a limit to how cool an accelerating universe can get. © Getty Images In the right kind of accelerating universe "life can go on indefinitely", say Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan and William Kinney of Columbia University...

New word in life's lexiconResearchers find 22nd amino acid in a microbe.24 May 2002JOHN WHITFIELDThere's a new word to life's vocabulary. DNA letters can be rearranged to spell out a 22nd amino acid, researchers have discovered. DNA: the letters of life have more permutations than we thought. © Getty Images The scientists who cracked life's genetic code in the 1950s said that it writes a mere 20 'words' - the amino acids from which the myriad proteins in all life are built. But in 1986 another amino acid was discovered in bacteria. "We thought the 21st was an aberration,...

Scientists use implanted electrodes to control rats' movements from afar Wed May 1, 4:05 PM ETBy RICK CALLAHAN, Associated Press WriterINDIANAPOLIS - By implanting electrodes in rats' brains, scientists have created remote-controlled rodents they can command to turn left or right, climb trees and navigate piles of rubble — and maybe someday, with the rats outfitted with tiny video cameras, use to search for disaster survivors. "If you have a collapsed building and there are people under the rubble, there's no robot that exists now that would be capable of going down into such a difficult terrain and finding those...

Cells reprogram in 24 hoursErasing molecular memory of parents could shed light on clones.19 April 2002HELEN PEARSON An embryo deletes its parents mark early on. © GettyImages Cells naturally wipe out the mark of their parents in 24 hours, say cloning experts. Exactly how may begin to explain the way that animal clones and stem cells are reprogrammed.Not all genes are born equal. In mammals, some genes are imprinted - cells switch on only the copy inherited from mum or dad, not both.This sex stamp must be erased and rewritten in sperm and egg cells, however, so they are...

The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service     Prayer doubles IVF success rate   09:53   05  October  01 Emma Young   Prayer can double the success rate of IVF treatments, according to a double blind study published in the respected Journal of Reproductive Medicine. A team in the US asked groups of people around the world to pray for pregnancy in one half of almost 200 women undergoing the fertility treatment in South Korea. The prayer groups were given only photographs of the women, and the women were unaware of the study. Despite controls for age, length ...

A Scientific Account of the Origin of Life on EarthExcerpted from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene [ The following excerpt is a layman's explanation of the theory of the origin of life on earth which is mostly widely accepted among scientists. The title for the article is my own. --Unalienable ] The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative; by definition, nobody was around to see what happened. There are a number of rival theories, but they all have certain features in common. The simplified account I shall give is probably not too far ...

DNA damage limitation linkAnother link is made in the web of cellular self-maintenance.21 June 2001 JOHN WHITFIELD Cells will take a pitstop if DNA gets damaged. Cells proceed with caution. If they detect damage to their DNA they pull over for repairs before going on to the next stage in their cycle. A newfound link between two key players in this fail-safe mechanism fills a gap in the ill-understood early phase of the DNA repair process. DNA repair is also a critical component of cells' efforts to avoid turning cancerous. One of the main motivations behind researchers' drive to ...

Human genome debuggedQuarrel over bacteria-to-human gene transfers resolved.21 June 2001 HELEN PEARSON Cross purposes: bacteria probably didn't modify our genome. Bacteria aren't as free and easy with their genes as some would have us believe. Genes have not hopped directly from bacteria to humans but were inherited from common ancestors, say researchers, whose evidence is now settling an evolutionary row and allaying fears about genetically modified organisms1,2. The human genome sequence contained some real surprises. The public sequencing consortium's announcement that at least 113 genes were likely to have jumped into the genome by 'horizontal transfer' from bacteria caused ...