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ScienceDaily (Sep. 12, 2011) - The HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile is the world's most successful planet finder [1]. The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor (University of Geneva, Switzerland), have announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including sixteen super-Earths [2]. This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time [3]. The new findings are being presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems where 350 exoplanet experts are meeting in Wyoming, USA.

Ernst Molitor fordert stetige Antibiotika- Mikrobiologie-Forschung

"The CADET tool found that children consumed on average 293 g F&V (95% CI 287 to 303) per day. Clustered (by school) multilevel regression models with total F&V as the primary outcome were conducted to explore how the home environment affects children's F&V intake. Children of families who reported 'always' eating a family meal together at a table had 125 g (95% CI 92 to 157; p=

Scientist recently discovered the first ever Earth-like planet. The discovery was announced on 5th December 2011.

"The molecule PKR (the double-stranded RNA-activated protein kinase) was originally described as a sensor of viral infections, but its function in the brain was totally unknown," said Dr. Mauro Costa-Mattioli, assistant professor of neuroscience at BCM and senior author of the paper. Since the activity of PKR is altered in a variety of cognitive disorders, Costa-Mattioli and colleagues decided to take a closer look at its role in the mammalian brain. Super memory The authors discovered that mice lacking PKR in the brain have a kind of "super" memory. "

""Experiments with amoebae that usually live as individuals but must also join with others to form multicellular bodies to complete their life cycles showed that cooperation depends on kinship. If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit. A multicellular body like the human body is an incredibly cooperative thing," Queller says, "and sociobiologists have learned that really cooperative things are hard to evolve because of the potential for cheating. "It's the single-cell bottleneck that generates high relatedness among the cells that, in turn, allows them to cooperate, " he says."

"We often think that the limiting factors to doing science are intellectual or technological. There are many unsolved scientific problems that we know how to answer. We aren't waiting for any conceptual breakthroughs or new technologies. We're waiting for people. We need "hands at the bench" to put in the time to collect the data. The instabilities of salary is a major limiting factor for science and is probably a big reason a lot of them get out of science: they don't see a way to pay the bills. Creating permanent, stable positions for scientists would release a lot of scientific research."

A recent article in Scientific American questioned whether research on stem cell lines derived from unfertilized eggs was too tightly regulated by the federal government. Now that technology allows the creation of stem cells without fertilization, there is no question that federal laws and guidelines are overly restrictive, causing a detrimental effect on valuable scientific inquiry.

"In our recent paper, we take a different approach. We consider how measurements work in the macroworld, finding that some quantum features are simply unobservable. Most remarkably, this approach shows that something called quantum nonlocality disappears for objects big enough to contain roughly the Avogadro number of atoms-the number of atoms you'd expect in a few grams of matter."

"Wie steuern Gene das Verhalten? Anne von Philipsborn vom Forschungsinstitut für molekulare Pathologie in Wien hat erstmals den Weg vom Gen zur Nervenzelle und von der Nervenzelle zum Verhalten nachvollziehen können - anhand des Balzverhaltens der Fliegenmännchen."

A Libertarian Economist retracts a swipe at the left-after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think.

" Of course, skeptics hope that their efforts aid in advancing science education.1 In spite of these efforts, survey data from several sources suggests that paranormal belief and pseudoscientific thinking continue to be commonplace.2 Skeptics often use these findings to reinforce arguments for more science education. Their argument is based upon the largely untested assumption that increased science knowledge reduces the number of paranormal beliefs an individual holds. However, this assumption may not be valid. Andrew Ede recently argued that science education may do little to raise the level of rational thinking and may, in fact, actually deter it!"