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I just read a concerning paper about an experimental stem cell treatment for children with autism. The authors are Himanshu Bansal and colleagues of India. The senior author, Prasad S Koka, is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Stem Cells where the paper appeared, which raises questions about whether the manuscript received a thorough peer review. Koka is actually an author on all five of the research papers published in that issue of the journal. But that’s a minor issue compared to ...read more

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A trove of footage from early U.S. nuclear weapons tests has just been declassified and uploaded to YouTube. The film release was part of a project headed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapons physicist Greg Spriggs which aimed to digitize and preserve thousands of films documenting the nation’s nuclear history. The endeavor required an all-hands-on deck approach from archivists, film experts and software engineers, but the team says that this digitized d ...read more

New research finds bits of Earth’s original crust in Canada. (Credit NASA) Researchers who want to study the nature of Earth’s original crust find themselves between a rock and a hard place: Our planet’s top layer is constantly wearing down in one spot and building up in another, continents colliding or slip-sliding past each other in the great mosh pit of plate tectonics. You might have figured none of the early crust was even still around. New research shows you would have f ...read more

(Credit: CatchaSnap/Shutterstock) Natural variability in atmospheric conditions could account for as much as half of the recent decline in Arctic sea ice, according to a new study. While the masses of ice that float atop the planet have been in steady decline over the past few decades, scientists haven’t been able to say how much of the losses are attributable to human-driven climate change and how much is simply the result of periodic swings in climate conditions. While the scientific c ...read more

Photo: flickr/Alan Levine We know that dogs have a guilty look, but can they actually be guilty? Well, according to this study, the answer is… kind of. Here, researchers show that dogs are capable of “deceptive-like behavior.” In a set of experiments, dogs tended to lead a human “competitor” away from food when that human would keep it for himself. However, the same dogs happily lead their “cooperative” owner to the ...read more

By Lishka Arata, Conservation Educator at Point Blue Volunteers collecting a sample from the lake to examine under the microscope. Photo: CMC Despite the current administration’s efforts to roll back the Clean Water Act and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, interest and participation is growing in a new EPA- and stakeholder-led citizen science project that aims to inform clean water management. The Cyanobacteria Monitoring Collaborative has been gathering steam since 2010, wh ...read more

A 3-D rendering of the internal structure of a microchip. The material in yellow is copper — showing the processor’s circuit connections which link the individual transistors. The smallest lines shown are individually around 45 nanometers wide. (Credit: Mirko Holler) Computer chips continue to shrink ever smaller, but we still wring more processing power out of them. One of the problems that comes with taking our technology to the nanoscale, however, is that we can no longer s ...read more

A farmer sprays field with a nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium fertilizer. (Credit: oticki/Shutterstock) All life needs phosphorus and agricultural yields are improved when phosphorus is added to growing plants and the diet of livestock. Consequently, it is used globally as a fertilizer – and plays an important role in meeting the world’s food requirements. In order for us to add it, however, we first need to extract it from a concentrated form – and the supply comes almost exc ...read more