“…”In the past, it was thought the Chasma Boreale canyon formed by melting the bottom of the ice sheet and having the floodwater carve the canyon, or perhaps having winds erode the canyon into the ice sheet from above,” said Byrne. “In this study, we’ve figured out that the canyon has actually always been there and the ice cap grew up on either side of it.”

“The arrangement of the internal layers we see with the radar instrument and the layers exposed on cliffs that we see with HiRISE have allowed us to reconstruct the history of this feature.”

“Nobody realized that there would be such complex structures in the layers,”…” Full Slice

“…Scientists think more CO2 was locked up in the deep ocean during ice ages, and that pulses or ‘burps’ of CO2 from the deep Southern Ocean helped trigger a global thaw every 100,000 years or so. The size of these pulses was roughly equivalent to the change in CO2 experienced since the start of the industrial revolution.

If this theory is correct, we would expect to see large transfers of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere at the end of each ice age….” Full Slice

“…the construction of so-called “libraries” of carbohydrate molecules for biological study has been slow and tedious. In what may change all that, a team of scientists…has created a method for the rapid chemical synthesis of complex carbohydrates, and that method could dramatically change the availability of such molecules for research…”The emerging field of glycomics has been severely hampered by a lack of robust, well-defined libraries of carbohydrate molecules, which are greatly needed to decipher the ‘carbohydrate codes’ used by cells for processes such as cell signaling, embryogenesis and neuronal development,”…” Full Slice

“Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome. They now hope to use this method to probe the basic machinery of life and to engineer bacteria specially designed to solve environmental or energy problems…”This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer,”…” Full Slice and Another Slice

“The very latest laser technology combined with old fashioned pedal power is being used to provide a unique insight into the layout of Nottingham’s sandstone caves — where the city’s renowned medieval ale was brewed and, where legend has it, the country’s most famous outlaw Robin Hood was imprisoned…Below the grounds of Nottingham Castle and across the city there is a labyrinth of medieval tunnels, dungeons, maltings and cellars — people even carved primitive living quarters out of Nottingham’s sandstone cliffs….” Full Slice

“…The team discovered that 64 percent of the proteins found in the stem cells grown in simulated microgravity were not in control samples. In particular, the bioreactor cells contained several proteins involved in the breakdown of bone and in the regulation of calcium, neither type of which were found in stem cells grown in regular, Earth gravity.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study conducted that has investigated the effect of (simulated microgravity conditions) on an embryonic stem cell line and demonstrated a significant alteration in human cell function as a result of growth in microgravity conditions,”…” Full Slice

“Researchers…have found that the level of a single protein in the tiny roundworm C. elegans determines how long it lives. Worms born without this protein, called arrestin, lived about one-third longer than normal, while worms that had triple the amount of arrestin lived one-third less.

The research also showed that arrestin interacts with several other proteins within cells to regulate longevity. The human version of one of these proteins is PTEN, a well-known tumor suppressor….” Full Slice

“…researcher… has shown that the protein called synaptotagmin1 (Syt1) is the sole trigger for the release of neurotransmitters in the brain.

Prior to this research, Syt1 was thought to be a part of the protein structure (not the sole protein) that triggered the release of neurotransmitters at 10 parts per million of calcium….” Full Slice

“A team of researchers…has discovered an inexpensive metal catalyst that can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water at neutral pH or from sea water.

The new proton reduction catalyst is based on a molybdenum-oxo metal complex that is about 70 times cheaper than platinum…” Full Slice

“…By compressing the surface platinum atoms closer together, the process causes platinum atoms to bind a little more weakly to oxygen atoms and inch closer to the balance point between molecule dissociation and catalytic binding…The ultimate goal is to create a potential replacement not only for gasoline engines but also for the batteries found in small electronic devices…It is the first step to designer catalyists….” Full Slice

“…One way to improve the efficiency of solar cells is to allow light to bounce around inside them, increasing the chances that it will be absorbed. One way to do this is to roughen the surface of a silicon cell, so that photons that enter the material tend to be reflected inside it. But by how much does this light trapping improve performance?…nanophotonics dramatically changes the game….” Full Slice

“A link between low solar activity and jet streams over the Atlantic could explain why, despite global warming trends, people in regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean might need to brace themselves for more frequent cold winters in years to come…We have discovered that this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low.”…The researchers suggest that the anomaly in Northern Europe’s winter temperatures could be to do with a phenomenon called ‘blocking’…The researchers have found strong correlations between weak solar activity and the occurrences of ‘blocking’….” Full Slice

“…if this evidence is taken at face value, it leaves us with a significant conceptual dilemma. On the one hand, it shows that Quantis produces sequences of random numbers that cannot be generated by a computer. And yet Quantis itself is a machine that must work by manipulating information in the way the laws of physics allow–it must be a computer of sorts.

This contradiction can only mean there is something wrong with the way we think about randomness or information or both (or at least with the way I’ve set it up here)….” Full Slice

“…Statistical analysis of day-to-day temperatures at Baker Lake, Nunavut, showed that in May and June the persistence of temperature had recently declined, matching Inuit reports of greater unpredictability at that season. “People hadn’t previously looked at persistence in this way,”…What they found was a scientific story more in line with what people were witnessing on the ground. Weather along the Arctic latitudes was behaving more unpredictably than in other parts of the world.

“That’s an incredibly important parameter to care about,”…” Full Slice

“Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by ‘poisonous’ sulphides. Researchers…report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen…instead of aerobic mitochondria, these animals possess organelles resembling the hydrogenosomes found previously in unicellular organisms….” Full Slice