On 26th October the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan en route to Earth’s closest planetary neighbour – the ultimate “greenhouse” planet, Venus. This is the first European mission to Venus, the nearest planet to the Earth and the brightest object in our night sky, apart from the Moon.

Whilst Earth and Venus share certain characteristics such as age, mass and diameter they are worlds apart in other respe

Here’s one way to win a debate: Start an argument with folks who aren’t particularly talented debaters. Then keep them on the defensive with complicated, highly philosophical spurious attacks and baffling red herring arguments. Finally, before they have finished responding, pull the rug out from under them with a well-planned political end-run that trumps the whole debate.

That basically sums up the strategy being employed by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement as it con

An international team of researchers has partially untangled the genetic details of a mysterious disorder that formerly caused seizures and death in infant boys within a month of birth.

The researchers discovered a rare change in the DNA of two eastern Missouri families with a history of a condition called X-linked recessive idiopathic hypoparathyroidism (XLHPT): a portion of the X chromosome, a human sex chromosome, has been removed and replaced by a copy of a much larger sectio

Clinically annotated results are publicly available online

The International Genomics Consortium’s (IGC) Expression Project for Oncology (expO) today announced that it has collected its 1,000th frozen cancer specimen, which exceeds original expectations for the project while marking a milestone that is recognized by researchers, industry and academia. Gene expression analysis with clinical information on hundreds of these specimens is now publicly available online.

The leech has recently confirmed its biomedical interest for scientists by showing that it contains an extensive list of new potential molecules that may become useful tools in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. The details of this research appear in the October issue of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.

Scientists have increasingly turned to blood-feeding invertebrates as a source for drugs and lead c

First-ever images of living human retinas have yielded a surprise about how we perceive our world. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week’s journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.

New tool speeding the discovery of genes for common diseases

The International HapMap Consortium today published a comprehensive catalog of human genetic variation, a landmark achievement that is already accelerating the search for genes involved in common diseases, such as asthma, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

In a paper in the Oct. 27 issue of the journal Nature, more than 200 researchers from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United

Researchers studying how proteins called helicases travel along strands of DNA have found that when the proteins hit an obstacle they snap back to where they began, repeating the process over and over, possibly playing a preventative role in keeping the genome intact.

Taekjip Ha, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, likens the biological scenario to Boston Red Sox baseball; the team rolls along

Discovery could lead to prostate-cancer-specific diagnostic test and more effective treatment

Scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have discovered a recurring pattern of scrambled chromosomes and abnormal gene activity that occurs only in prostate cancer.

In a paper being published in the Oct. 28 issue of Science, the research team indicates that these chromosomal rea

Laboratory experiments at UCR demonstrate interactions between two atoms containing antimatter

What happens when two atoms, each made up of an electron and its antimatter counterpart, called the positron, collide with each other? UC Riverside physicists are able to see for the first time in the laboratory that these atoms, which are called positronium atoms and are unstable by nature, become even more unstable after the collision. The positronium atoms are seen to destroy one a

An international team of scientists including the University of Leeds’ Liane Benning have successfully trialled techniques to search for life on Mars. Their findings – microbes deep within ice-filled volcanic tubes – reveal how to test for life on the red planet.

Dr Benning from earth and environment is the sole UK member of the AMASE team studying rocks, ice and micro-organisms on the arctic island of Svalbard in Norway, which has a geology similar to that of parts of Mars. “

The European spacecraft Venus Express has been successfully placed into a trajectory that will take it on its journey from the Earth towards its destination of the planet Venus, which it will reach next April. A virtual twin sister of the Mars Express spacecraft which has been orbiting the Red Planet since December 2003, Venus Express is the second planet-bound probe to be launched by the European Space Agency.

Venus Express will eventually manoeuvre itself into orbit around Ven

By studying how superconductors interact with magnetic fields, Pitt researchers advance quest for higher-temperature superconducting materials

Superconductors are materials with no electrical resistance that are used to make strong magnets and must be kept extremely cold–otherwise, they lose their superconducting abilities. Even the “high-temperature” superconductors discovered in the 1980s must be kept at around -300°F.

The search for superconductors that function at hi

Researchers can identify patients likely to respond to drug therapy, saving some from undergoing harsh procedures with little chance of success

Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer have identified key characteristics in certain deadly brain tumors that make them 51 times more likely to respond to a specific class of drugs than tumors in which the molecular signature is absent.

The discovery of the telltale molecular signature – the expression of a mutant protein and

For most people, just a whiff of food that has made them sick in the past is enough to trigger a wave of nausea – and to prevent them from eating that food again. It’s a response that’s instantaneous, involuntary, and so fundamental to basic biology that it occurs in a broad range of species. Even worms, researchers have now shown, quickly learn to avoid smells associated with foods that have made them ill.

The new study, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigat

When the appetite-enhancing hormone ghrelin was discovered a few years ago, researchers thought they had found the last of the major genes that regulate weight. They were wrong.

Introducing: obestatin, a newly discovered hormone that suppresses appetite.

The finding, to be published in the Nov. 11 issue of Science, offers a key to researchers developing treatments for obesity. In a nation that desperately needs to slim down – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and P

High-tech in Earth System Science at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

Record-breaking high-tech has been successfully employed in Earth System Science at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) in Hamburg, Germany.

– The largest database in the world under the free Linux operating system has been installed in Hamburg by the Wold Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) and the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) . This is confirmed in the inter

Record database at the German Climate Computing Centre’s World Data Centre for Climate

The World Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) and the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) in Hamburg run the largest database in the world under the free Linux operating system. This is confirmed in the international ranking list of the world’s largest databases published by the Winter Corporation in September. The WDCC database at the DKRZ has an inconceivable volume of almost 220 te

Scientists thought sickle and thalassemia traits would be potent combination; instead, they cancel each other out

Two genetic conditions–sickle cell trait and a mild version of the blood disorder known as thalassemia–that by themselves give millions of Africans natural protection against malaria, can be rendered essentially useless when they occur together, according to a new study of Kenyan children that is to be discussed today at the Fourth Multilateral Initiative on Malaria

CERN has received the High Performance Computing (HPC) Public Awareness Award at a ceremony at Supercomputing 2005 in Seattle this week. Supercomputing 2005 is the foremost international conference for HPC. The award was presented by HPCwire, the leading HPC publication, as one of their 2005 Editors’ Choice Awards, a category where the winner is determined by a panel of recognized HPC luminaries and contributing editors from industry. The award citation is for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Creating Pub