science

Countless childhood dreams dissolved today upon the news that the calculated half-life of DNA figures out to around 521 years, all but invalidating the chances of a real-life "Jurassic Park."

The DNA fact-finding project involved a team of palaeogeneticists testing 158 leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant moa birds ranging from 600 to 8,000 years old.

After running a series of comparisons between the age of the various bones and DNA degradation within each specimen, the researchers estimated that DNA's half-life works out to about 521 years after being kept in a swamp with an average temperature of 13.1 Celsius (55 Fahrenheit). Even a more ideal preservation temperature of minus 5 Celsius (23 Fahrenheit) would only result in readable DNA from specimens up to 1.5 million years old, meaning there is no possible way we can see a 65-million-year-old T-Rex waving its tiny arms about in this time frame. … Read more

When I interviewed Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka back in 2008, I had an inkling he'd win the Nobel Prize one day for his work on stem cells. I didn't pay any mind to his appearance or background.

Yamanaka shared the Nobel in physiology or medicine this week with Britain's John Gurdon for their groundbreaking work on changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any type of cell in the body.

It turns out that Yamanaka defied the odds. He was born in September, he's 50, bespectacled, and Japanese. According to a historical survey of Nobel laureates by the BBC, which goes back to 1901, those aren't favorable characteristics. … Read more

If you like reading, bundles, science fiction, fantasy, and/or supporting charity, today's your lucky day.

The folks at Humble Bundle, who regularly serve up indie games on the cheap, have created the Humble eBook Bundle, a collection of six sci-fi/fantasy e-books for whatever price you want to pay.

That means you can literally drop a penny to get half a dozen DRM-free novels. But you're not that cheap, right? Here's why you should give serious consideration to paying more:

Writers need to eat. I've often railed against e-book prices, but certainly a buck per … Read more

To put it lightly, something sensational happens upon feeding large concentrations of toxic gold chloride (also known as liquid gold) to the bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans. After about a week's time, the bacterium creates a 24-karat gold nugget from the digested toxins.

"Microbial alchemy is what we're doing, transforming gold from something that has no value into a solid, precious metal that's valuable," said Kazem Kashefi, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University, where the research is taking place. … Read more

After creeping about 500 yards across the rocky floor of Gale Crater on the way to an intriguing intersection of different terrain types, the Mars Curiosity rover is pausing for a few weeks near fine-grained sand dunes to scoop up soil and run it through the vehicle's sample acquisition system to clean out any lingering traces of Earth's environment.

After three such "rinse and repeat" cycles, a scoop on the end of the rover's robot arm will deposit small samples into a pair of sophisticated laboratory instruments, the Chemistry and Mineralogy experiment, or CheMin, and … Read more

Setting up shop in and around the New York Hall of Science, Maker Faire brought with it its usual cavalcade of robots, 3D printers, lock-picking tutorials, DIY circuit boards, and other experimental, artistic, and otherwise inspired technology and creative projects.

I certainly didn't capture everything at the event in the above slideshow, but after walking around for 3 hours this past Saturday, I'll say that I caught a reasonably representative slice of the Maker Faire at large.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, slowly nearing its initial science destination where multiple types of terrain come together, has found outcrops of conglomerate rocks made up of eroded gravels that scientists believe were transported across the floor of Gale Crater by a "vigorous" flow of ankle- to hip-deep water in the distant past, scientists said today.

It's the first observation of its kind on Mars, showing that an alluvial fan photographed from orbit was, as suspected, formed by the action of flowing water that entered the crater through a 100-foot-deep, 2,000-foot-wide channel dubbed Peace Vallis that … Read more

More than half the way to its first major scientific destination, the Curiosity Mars rover will pause a few days to perform the mission's first hands-on geology, using instruments on the vehicle's robot arm to photograph and chemically assess an intriguing pyramid-shaped rock, project managers said Wednesday.

Data from the arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, or APXS, will be compared with remote sensing data from another instrument known as Chemcam that uses a powerful laser to vaporize tiny sections of a target's surface. Debris from the laser strike is measured remotely to help determine chemical composition.

"… Read more

COCOA BEACH, Fla.--Bolted to the back of a 747 jumbo jet, the space shuttle Endeavour took off on its final voyage this morning, a "bittersweet" valedictory tour highlighted by low-altitude passes over NASA field centers, towns and cities along the way to museum duty in Los Angeles, giving the public one last chance to see the winged spaceplane in flight.

Running two days late because of stormy weather along the Gulf Coast, the NASA 747 and its 78-ton payload lifted off the Kennedy Space Center's 3-mile-long shuttle runway at 7:22 a.m. ET, following a … Read more