Archive: 2014

Global warming is certainly one of the hottest issues in today’s world, and it is a phenomenon that shows no signs of cooling down. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, average temperatures around the world have climbed 1.4 degrees…

In the typical story of climate change, greenhouse gases – predominantly from emissions associated with burning fossil fuels – are released into the atmosphere and warm the earth. As we continue to emit more greenhouse gases, Earth’s average surface…

On the scale of a human lifetime the Earth’s climate appears to be relatively stable and predictable: we plant in the spring, we harvest in the fall, and if we are fortunate, we might vacation in the winter someplace warm.  We understand that Earth’s…

Scientific conclusions about climate change have moved beyond the realm of pure science and begun to percolate into social policy and political decisions. As a result, many non-scientists are interested in the latest news about climate change, from…

An overwhelming scientific consensus agrees that global climate change is real and humans are causing it. The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a publication that aggregates current climate-science knowledge, concluded…

Cancer research laboratories have historically studied tumors in vertebrate models, such as monkeys and mice, and in a few invertebrate species, like fruit flies. Only recently have scientists chosen to pursue cancer from a completely new perspective.…

A recent story that's stillplanet scape - space art making waves is the detection of Kepler 186f, a planet the size of Earth and in the so called "habitable zone" of its host star. It would seem K186f is then very much like Earth but that's not exactly…

A new banana, genetically engineered to produce ample amount of provitamin A, has hit the news. They're heading for human trials in the US and to the fields of Uganda by 2020, if all goes well for the Australian and Ugandan scientists developing them.…

Presented by Yuly Fuentes-Medel Model organism systems amenable to genetic manipulation have made seminal contributions to many aspects of modern science. These organisms with small brains have inspired the discoveries of big ideas in such complex…

About two months ago we published a short report on a new study that pioneered creating an entire chromosome of yeast; an organism with similar cellular organization as humans. Just a week ago, a discussion flared up on Reddit about the consequences for…