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Suspending a life in time is a theme that normally finds itself in the pages of science fiction, but now such ideas have become a reality in the annals of science.

Cosmic rays pour down on Earth like a constant rain. We don't much notice these high-energy particles, but they may have played a role in the evolution of life on our planet.

"A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander. In a report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Wistar Institute demonstrate that mice that lack the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue."

All of which could lend credence to the suggestion of biochemist Lawrence Henderson in 1913 that water is peculiarly favourable to the evolution of life. In the introduction to a 1958 edition of Henderson's book, Wald wrote 'we now believe that life… must arise inevitably wherever it can, given enough time.' But perhaps what it needs is not so much enough time, but the right amount of heat.

Dogs Decoded reveals the science behind the remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and investigates new discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs - with surprising implications for the evolution of human culture. Other research is proving what dog lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently?

The Bolshoi simulation is the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe yet made ("bolshoi" is the Russian word for "great" or "grand").  The first two of a series of research papers describing Bolshoi and its implications have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The first data release of Bolshoi outputs, including output from Bolshoi and also the BigBolshoi or MultiDark simulation of a volume 64 times bigger than Bolshoi, has just been made publicly available to the world's astronomers and astrophysicists.

Materials research continues to remain intrinsically and interdisciplinary even after the evolution of the rise of, journals, societies, and departments, which now explain the field explicitly.

We make decisions every day based on the visible world around us. Yet much of our lives is shaped by what we can't see. Jessica Green wants people to see the important role microbes, ecology and evolution play in every facet of our lives. "Touring a building with Jessica Green can be an unsettling experience. "We live nearly 90 percent of our lives indoors, but we know almost nothing about that environment.""

"You should never diet again: The science and genetics of weight loss To maintain a new weight, you have to fight evolution. You have to fight biology. And you have to fight your brain "

"WikiPathways is an open, public platform dedicated to the curation of biological pathways by and for the scientific community. "

"SDSS-III's newest release is Data Release 10 (DR10). DR10 contains the first spectra of the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), as well as additional sky coverage and better galaxy parameter estimates from BOSS."

Das Vogelweibchen gibt den Ton an, Current Biology http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2812%2901125-6 "Vogeleltern und andere Artgenossen, die bei der Brutpflege helfen, füttern den Nachwuchs nur dann, wenn der Bettelruf der Jungen das gelernte Passwort enthält", erklärt Studienautorin Sonia Kleindorfer von der Flinders University in Australien. Sie und ihr Team entdeckten den Coderuf eher zufällig, als sie Nester des Prachtstaffelschwanzes beobachteten. Ursprünglich untersuchten die Forscher Alarmrufe, welche die Singvögel im Angesicht von Nesträubern von sich geben. Dabei fiel ihnen das seltsame Verhalten der brütenden Vögel auf: Die Mütter sangen dem ungeschlüpften Nachwuchs einen bestimmten Ton vor. Der spätere Bettelgesang des Nachwuchses ähnelte offenbar dem Ruf der Mütter."

Im Laufe seiner Evolutionsgeschichte hat sich die Lebenserwartung des Menschen massiv erhöht. Wie außergewöhnlich dieser Sprung ist, haben Wissenschaftler des Max-Planck-Instituts für demografische Forschung in Rostock jetzt eindrucksvoll belegt. Sie verglichen die Sterblichkeitsprofile verschiedener menschlicher Populationen und wild lebender Schimpansen mit der Mortalität einer evolutionsbiologisch natürlichen Menschenpopulation von Jägern und Sammlern. Das erstaunliche Ergebnis: Allein in den letzten 100 Jahren sank die Sterblichkeit des Menschen um ein Vielfaches stärker als beim Entwicklungssprung von einem Schimpansen ähnlichen Vorfahren zum „Jäger und Sammler". Und damit nicht genug: Die Geschwindigkeit, mit der das Sterberisiko des Menschen seit dem Jahr 1900 abnimmt, wird von keinem anderen Lebewesen übertroffen. Selbst Spezies wie Würmer und Mäuse, die im Labor gezielt auf Langlebigkeit gezüchtet werden, können da kaum mithalten. Damit steht die große Veränderbarkeit der Mortalität des Menschen im Widerspruch zu allen konventionellen Theorien des Alterns

Kumaran D et al., The Emergence and Representation of Knowledge about Social and Nonsocial Hierarchies, 2012, Neuron, doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.09.035 Eine neue Studie, die in dem Journal Neuron veröffentlicht wurde, deckt auf, wie das Gehirn Informationen darüber abspeichert, wer in einer Gruppe das ‚Sagen' hat. Die Studie, die gemeinsam von Wissenschaftlern des Instituts für Kognitive Neurologie und Demenzforschung der Universität Magdeburg (IKND), des Deutschen Zentrums für Neurodegenerative Erkrankungen (DZNE, Standort Magdeburg) und der University College London (UCL) durchgeführt wurde, zeigt, dass Menschen zum Lernen von sozialen Rangfolgen einen bestimmten Teil des Gehirns brauchen. Die Größe dieses Gehirnareals sagt voraus, wie gut jemand soziale Rangfolgen lernen und einschätzen kann. Menschen und andere Primaten sind bemerkenswert gut darin, sich gegenseitig innerhalb einer sozialen Hierarchie einzuordnen. „Diese Fähigkeit ist überlebensnotwendig, weil sie hilft, Konflikte zu vermeiden und vorteilhafte Koalitionspartner zu finden. Allerdings wissen wir überraschend wenig darüber, wie das Gehirn dies steuert", sagt der Neurowissenschaftler Prof. Emrah Düzel.

LAWA will federate distributed FIRE facilities with the rich Web repository of the European Archive, to create a Virtual Web Observatory and use Web data analytics as a use case study to validate our design. The outcome of our work will enable Internet-scale analysis of data, and bring the content aspect of the Internet on the roadmap of Future Internet Research. In four work packages we will extend the open-source Hadoop software by novel methods for wide-area data access, distributed storage and indexing, scalable data aggregation and data analysis along the time dimension, and automatic classification of Web contents.

""You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits," he said. "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one's ability to make further decisions. It's why shopping is so exhausting. "You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia." The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. "You can't wander around," he said. "It's much harder to be surprised. You don't have those moments of serendipity."

"Levi and his co-authors, former Sauder PhD students Qianqian Du and Huasheng Gao, investigated the birth-date effect in a sample of 375 CEOs from S&P 500 companies between 1992 and 2009. "Our study adds to the growing evidence that the way our education system groups students by age impacts their lifelong success," says Prof. Levi. "We could be excluding some of the business world's best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early.""