NPR Topics: Science

Obama Policy Shelves Most Bush-Era Stem Cell Lines

President Obama's stem cell policy, announced a year ago this month, opened up federal funding for more stem cell lines created from human embryos. But now, scientists are facing a bitter irony — a few popular stem cell lines that could be studied with federal money under President Bush are suddenly off-limits.

We all have bacteria growing on our skin, and the kind and number we carry around is unique to each person. Now, researchers say bacterial "fingerprints" could be a valuable forensic tool.

Middle-aged adults who behaved badly as kids were more likely to have chronic pain than grownups who were angels, a British study finds. A disruption in the brain may be the common thread.

Research shows hearing loss in one ear during critical periods of brain development can rewire the auditory cortex, changing the way the brain processes sound. After hearing is restored, the brain eventually catches up.

A medical invention currently in development may one day be able to create new organs, right there in the hospital. The 3-D bio-printer takes cells from a patient's failing organ and "prints out" a new organ — almost like a 3-D ink-jet printer. Guy Raz explains how the device works with the man who developed the prototype, Gabor Forgacs.

Iron-rich cells that grow into balls when "levitated" by magnets could provide a new way to study cancer in the lab – and produce replacement tissue for grafts

The computational linguist argues that the world is not made of discrete objects nor represented by binary logic – time to embrace our fuzzy reality

By comparing the unique collection of bacteria found on a person's hand with those recovered at a crime scene, microbes could act like fingerprints

All today's stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: the extreme empaths who feel your pain, the true forces driving elephant poaching, and the power of the "Wasabi" gene

Freedom of information requests on animal experiments are unsettling researchers at British universities, says Andy Coghlan

Men and women with a history of alcohol abuse may not see long-term negative effects on their memory and thinking, but female smokers do, a new study suggests.

Simple, low-cost measures such as wearing a pedometer to inspire walking and spending a few minutes a day meditating can put adolescents on the track toward better health, researchers report.

The muscle-building abilities of hormones known as insulin-like growth factors (IGFs) are legendary. Just do an online search and you'll find not only scientific papers discussing the effects of IGFs on the cells that give rise to muscle tissue, but also scores of ads touting the purported benefits of IGF supplements for bodybuilding.

There are two powerful cyclones in the Southern Pacific Ocean this week, Tomas and Ului. Ului is a Category Four Cyclone on the Saffir-Simpson Scale and is affecting the Solomon Islands where warnings and watches have been posted today, March 15. NASA satellite data has confirmed that Ului is a strong cyclone with a wide reach.

Tomas grew into a monster Category 4 cyclone and thrashed the northern Fiji Islands with heavy rains and maximum sustained winds of up to 170 mph (275 kph). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of most of Cyclone Tomas on Mar. 14 10:21 p.m. ET and noticed the storm's eye is cloud-filled.

EcoEarth.Info Environment RSS Newsfeed

Australia: Bureau of Meteorology backs up climate science data

Radio Australia: The head of Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has come out in defence of the science which says that climate change is real. Director Greg Ayers says a century's worth of climate records show definitive evidence that the weather patterns are shifting and the planet is warming. There are more extremely hot days, fewer cold wet ones and the scientific observations confirm it's happening now. His comments follow similar remarks from Australia's peak scientific organisation, the CSIRO, in ...

Reuters: Americans have grown more content about current environmental quality over the past year, though 53 percent still rate conditions as only fair to poor, according to a Gallup poll released on Monday. Forty-six percent of the 1,014 adults surveyed March 4 to 7 described current U.S. environmental conditions as excellent or good. That was up from 39 percent in March 2009 and was the highest positive environmental rating measured by Gallup since 2002. The percentage of Americans ...

Guardian: Climate activists are predicting a campaign of direct action against a new coal-fired power station that could be the UK's first to fit carbon-capture technology. Campaigners say that if the proposed 1.6GW station in Ayrshire is approved, it will be the "new Kingsnorth", a reference to E.ON's controversial coal-fired plant in Kent that sparked battles between protesters and police before E.ON finally shelved it. The warnings from Friends of the Earth (FoE) Scotland, WWF ...

Mongabay: Pressure is building on the French shipping company Delmas to cancel large shipments of rosewood, which was illegally logged in Madagascar during the nation's recent coup. Today two environmental groups, Global Witness and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) called on Delmas to cancel the shipment, which is currently being loaded onto the Delmas operated ship named 'Kiara' in the Madagascar port of Vohemar. Global Witness and EIA have composed an open letter to Delmas' CEO, ...

Mongabay: A drought that happens once in a hundred years had little negative or positive effect on the Amazon rainforest according to a NASA funded study in Geophysical Research Letters. "We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought," said Arindam Samanta, the study's lead author from Boston University. Employing NASA MODIS satellite ...

Guardian: The names alone should cause anyone whose heart still beats to stop and look again. Blotched woodwax. Pashford pot beetle. Scarce black arches. Mallow skipper. Marsh dagger. Each is a locket in which hundreds of years of history and thousands of years of evolution have been packed. Here nature and culture intersect. All are species that have recently become extinct in England. I cannot claim that I've been materially damaged by their loss, any more than the razing of the Prado would ...

BBC: Governments need to crack down on illegal tiger trading if the big cats are to be saved, the UN has warned. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Doha, Qatar heard that tiger numbers are continuing to fall. Organised crime rings are playing an increasing part in illegal trading of tiger parts, CITES says, as they are with bears, rhinos and elephants. Interpol is working with CITES to track and curb the international ...

Times (UK): Energy bills will rise but thousands of jobs could be created in green industries under a European plan to impose the world's most stringent restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. The Government will today support a proposal tabled in Brussels for a new, much more onerous EU target for cutting carbon dioxide even though other nations with higher emissions have failed to commit to reciprocal action. Ministers have abandoned their previous condition that the world must agree a ...

Radio Australia: The head of Australia's peak science body has spoken out in defence of climate scientists, saying the link between human activity and climate change is beyond doubt. The head of the CSIRO, Dr Megan Clark, says the evidence of global warming is unquestionable, and in Australia it is backed by years of robust research. Dr Clark says climate records are being broken every decade and all parts of the nation are warming. "We are seeing significant evidence of a changing ...

Reuters: Australia circa 2050, population 35 million, climate change induced rising sea levels have flooded the Gold Coast resort region, apartment blocks are now used to grow food and people commute in monorail pods above the sea. In another city, Australians live on floating island pods with apartments both below and above sea level, the population has shifted from land to the sea because of the sky-rocketing value of disappearing arable land. Climate change has also forced many ...

Reuters: Australia's top scientists on Monday released a "State of the Climate" report at a time of growing scepticism over climate change as a result of revelations of errors in some global scientific reports. The scientists said their monitoring and research of the world's driest inhabited continent for 100 years "clearly demonstrate that climate change is real." "We are seeing significant evidence of a changing climate. We are warming in every part of the country during every season ...

Inter Press Service: Seemingly unstoppable development has made a mockery of the protected status of this southern Indian region, which houses vast biodiversity and some of the finest examples of moist deciduous and tropical forests. In the last decade alone, the urban sprawl has reached these mountains, which have seen forests give way to more and more human settlements, as well as to a wide range of commercial activities. But a newly resurrected people's movement may yet reverse that trend. Just ...

Reuters: Compromise climate control legislation being developed in the U.S. Senate will use a cap-and-trade approach to reduce carbon emissions from utilities such as power plants, a key senator said on Monday. The senator, who asked not to be identified, added, "That's not to say there are not some details left to be resolved with utilities but the overall approach is that." In an interview with Reuters, the senator said: "There's more certainty about cap and trade for utilities" than ...

Olympian: Climate change has already wrought "pervasive, wide ranging" effects on the United States, and the federal government has "significant gaps" in its strategy to cope with those effects as they accelerate in the future, a White House task force will warn in a report on Tuesday. The report will call for better risk assessments, more thorough scientific research and improved coordination of federal and local governments in order to handle the impacts of warming temperatures, according to ...

SciDev.Net: Scientists and wildlife authorities are starting field trials of the first promising vaccine for a devastating cattle disease that plagues farmers across East Africa. Malignant catarrhal fever (MCF) is transmitted from wildebeest to cattle during the annual migration of over a million wildebeest across the Serengeti and Masai Mara in Kenya and Tanzania. The cattle die five days after symptoms are observed. About a tenth of the around 100,000 Masai livestock are ravaged by MCF ...