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Pluto’s dinky diameter wasn’t the official reason it was demoted from the planetary club back in 2006, but symbolically, size was the last straw. When Caltech astronomer Mike Brown spotted the object we now call Eris back in 2005 and astronomers figured it to be larger than Pluto, the former ninth planet’s fate was sealed. Now Pluto’s reclassification as a “dwarf planet” and the subsequent public outcry is behind us, but new research suggests that the former p ...read more

It may not be as miraculous as turning water into wine, or as wealth-generating as turning dirt into gold, but we still think this is a very cool trick: Researchers have transformed mature skin cells directly into mature blood cells. Crucially, this was done without reverting the cells to a flexible, “pluripotent” stage in which the cells can grow into any form. The technique, described in Nature, could lead to lab-grown blood cells for transfusions and transplants for people with bo ...read more

The figure to the left is a composite merged from two different papers. One analyzes the patterns of genetic variation within African Americans, and the other the patterns within the East Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs. The bar plots show the ancestral element which is similar to two parent populations which resemble Europeans and Africans or East Asians. Looking at total aggregate ancestral quanta we infer that African Americans are on the order of 15-25% European in ancestry, and 75-85% Afri ...read more

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Every year, the coming of warmer weather in the spring brings with it the scientific parlor game of predicting how many storms the impending Atlantic hurricane season will bring. But could meteorological prognosticators soon begin to predict storms years in advance, and not just months, with some accuracy? It is possible, a team led by Doug Smith of the U.K.’s Met Office says. In a study in Nature Geoscience, Smith essentially modeled the climate of past to see if the team’s system a ...read more

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In the 1920s the Soviet Union sponsored a “humanzee” breeding program. From what I recall the ultimate rationale for the funding was that the program might create a race of superior warriors, combing the incredible physical strength on a per pound basis of the chimp, with the greater level of intelligence found in human beings. To our knowledge the experiments were failures, though there have long been rumors of successes in these sorts of programs. I suspect the possibility per ...read more

Being a computer nerd just keeps getting worse. Not only can being addicted to the interwebz make it hard to meet chicks, but now research is showing that a man’s relationship with his laptop computer can affect even his most intimate of areas. The study, titled “Protection from scrotal hyperthermia in laptop computer users,” studied how laptop positioning affected testicle temperature. Participants were asked to sit with a laptop on their knees while the research team monitore ...read more