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Scientists had thought that there was a single species of housecat-sized Brazilian tigrina. However, the molecular data now show that tigrina populations in northeastern versus southern Brazil are completely separate, with no evidence of interbreeding between them. As such, they are best described as two distinct species.

"Mao's support of Chinese medicine was inspired by political necessity. In a 1950 speech (unwittingly echoed by the Senate's concerns about "providing health care to underserved populations"), he said: Our nation's health work teams are large. They have to concern themselves with over 500 million people [including the] young, old, and ill. … At present, doctors of Western medicine are few, and thus the broad masses of the people, and in particular the peasants, rely on Chinese medicine to treat illness. Therefore, we must strive for the complete unification of Chinese medicine"

"BioCurious is a completely volunteer run non-profit organization. We serve the community by providing low-cost lab space and classes to members. "

"100,000 skin samples every year (that's 5 square meters of skin or a full cow's-worth annually) at its lab in Lyon. Currently, the company receives bits of donor skin from plastic surgery procedures. Then L'Oreal breaks the samples down into individual cells, re-cultures and grows them into .5 cm testing squares. The whole process takes about a week to complete but could soon be done much faster thanks to Organovo's NovoGen Bioprinting Platform. ... The bioprinter has already partnered with Merk to create liver and kidney tissues"

One of the most complete early human skulls yet found suggests that what scientists thought were three hominin species may in fact be one. This controversial claim comes from a comparison between the anatomical features of a 1.8-million-year-old fossil skull with those of four other skulls from the same excavation site at Dmanisi, Georgia. The wide variability in their features suggests that Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, the species so far identified as existing worldwide in that era, might represent a single species.

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the "Torrance kids," a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, "How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?"

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum,  is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.     Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History  http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/    Visualization Software:  Uniview by SCISS    Director: Carter Emmart  Curator: Ben R. Oppenheimer  Producer: Michael Hoffman  Executive Producer: Ro Kinzler  Co-Executive Producer: Martin Brauen  Manager, Digital Universe Atlas: Brian Abbott    Music: Suke Cerulo    For more information visit http://www.amnh.org

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.

A celestial audit suggests that astronomers' inventory of luminous bodies may soon be complete (reprint of 3/02 article)

What do quantum particles do when we're not looking? Probably not what you'd expect.\n\nWhile the mathematical formalism 'behind the scenes' is perfectly well-defined and the predictions by the theory are completely sensible (and rigorously tested), it is often difficult to interpret the mechanism of quantum theory into ideas that make sense relative to everyday experiences.

Neuroscientists are mapping out a complete atlas of connectivity in the human brain, but what's emerging is a battle of scales.

In the past 30 years, a scientific revolution has completely transformed our understanding of babies and young children. Babies both know more and learn more than we would ever have thought possible, and we have recently begun to grasp the mechanisms by which they do this. I wrote The Philosophical Baby to try to show that thinking about childhood can help us answer deep questions about truth, imagination, love, consciousness, identity and morality. Without exaggeration, I believe it can tell us how we came to be human.

Fermilab physicists are examining the production, properties, and decay of top quarks to gain the most complete picture of the particle possible. They compare their observations to predictions made in the Standard Model of physics and in theories that build on that model.

"When biologist Anthony Cashmore claims that the concept of free will is an illusion, he's not breaking any new ground. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how humans seem to have the ability to make their own personal decisions in a manner lacking any causal component other than their desire to "will" something. But Cashmore, Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that many biologists today still cling to the idea of free will, and reject the idea that we are simply conscious machines, completely controlled by a combination of our chemistry and external environmental forces."

The last thing hatchling dinosaurs might have seen were giant snakes, researchers say. Scientists found the nearly complete remains of an 11-foot-long, 67-million-year-old serpent coiled around a crushed dinosaur egg right next to a hatchling in the nest of a sauropod dinosaur, the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth. "We think that the hatchling had just exited its egg, and that activity attracted the snake," explained researcher Dhananjay Mohabey, a paleontologist at the Geological Survey of India. "It was such a thrill to discover such a portentous moment frozen in time."

"In the study, researchers took two groups of healthy young adults. Each group completed two learning sessions. The difference was that between the first and second sessions, one group got to take a 90-minute nap. The group that got the nap improved in their ability to learn by 10 percent, while the non-napping group did 10 percent worse."

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/23/Marcus_Chown_in_Conversation_with_Fred_Watson Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe, discusses the mechanics behind quantum computers, explaining that they function by having atoms exist in multiple places at once. He predicts that quantum computers will be produced within 20 years. ----- The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einsteins general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world in which we live. But almost a century after their advent, most people havent the slightest clue what either is about. Radio astronomer, award-winning writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown talks to fellow stargazer Fred Watson about his book Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, he is now cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. The Magic Furnace, Marcus' second book, was chosen in Japan as one of the Books of the Year by Asahi Shimbun. In the UK, the Daily Mail called it "a dizzy page-turner with all the narrative devices you'd expect to find in Harry Potter". His latest book is called Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You.

Apply the electrodes... Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current. Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679). More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080). Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098). Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106).

You could be sitting alone and still be completely outnumbered for your body is home to trillions upon trillions of tiny passengers - bacteria. Your body is made up of around ten trillion cells, but you harbour a hundred trillion bacteria. For every gene in your genome, there are 100 bacterial ones. This is your 'microbiome' and it has a huge impact on your health, your ability to digest food and more. We, in turn, affect them. Everything from the food we eat to the way we're born influences the species of bacteria that take up residence in our bodies.This slideshow is a tour through this "universe of us". Every slide has links to previous pieces that I've written on the subject if you want to delve deeper.Image by David Gregory & Debbie Marshall, Wellcome Images

A diminutive chihuahua and a lumbering Irish wolfhound look completely different, yet most us know they both belong to the concept called "dog". Now the brain regions responsible for our ability to organise the world into separate concepts have been pinpointed.