Category Archives: News & Archives

Scientists have finally managed to extract DNA from Australia's extinct giant kangaroos ─ the mysterious marsupial megafauna that roamed Australia over 40,000 years ago. A team of scientists led by Dr Bastien Llamas and Professor Alan Cooper from the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) have extracted DNA sequences from two species:…

In a laboratory first, Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals. The lab-grown tissue should soon allow researchers to test new drugs and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body. The study was…

Why? That’s the first word on many lips after a cancer diagnosis. “It’s a perfectly reasonable question,” says Bert Vogelstein, a cancer geneticist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has spent a lifetime trying to answer it. Thanks to his friendship with a recently minted Ph.D. in applied mathematics, the two now propose…

Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo. "Wanderers" is a short science fiction film by Erik Wernquist – a digital artist and animator from Stockholm, Sweden. Wernquist notes that the film is a vision of humanity's future expansion into the solar system. Although admittedly speculative, the visuals in the…

Scientists at the University of Cambridge working with the Weizmann Institute have created primordial germ cells -- cells that will go on to become egg and sperm -- using human embryonic stem cells. Although this had already been done using rodent stem cells, the study, published in the journal Cell, is the first time this…

A definitive geological timeline shows that a series of massive volcanic explosions 66 million years ago spewed enormous amounts of climate-altering gases into the atmosphere immediately before and during the extinction event that claimed Earth's non-avian dinosaurs, according to new research from Princeton University. A primeval volcanic range in western India known as the Deccan…

Whitman biology professor Paul Yancey and students Anna Downing '16 and Chloe Weinstock '17 have returned from the first detailed study of the Mariana Trench aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel Falkor. The Mariana Trench -- located in the Western Pacific near Guam -- has been the focus of high-profile voyages to conquer Challenger Deep,…

Rice University scientists have detected at least three instances of cross-species mating that likely influenced the evolutionary paths of "old world" mice, two in recent times and one in the distant past. The researchers think these instances of introgressive hybridization -- a way for genetic material and, potentially, traits to be passed from one species…

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill. "This temporary increase in methane -- sharply up and then back down -- tells us there must be some relatively localized…

The link between a mother and child is profound, and new research suggests a physical connection even deeper than anyone thought. The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while her heartbeat provides a…