| Comet Pan-STARRS marches across the sky Posted: 06 Jul 2014 02:18 PM PDT NASA's NEOWISE mission captured a series of pictures of comet C/2012 K1 -- also known as comet Pan-STARRS -- as it swept across our skies in May 2014. The comet is named after the astronomical survey project called the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Hawaii, which discovered the icy visitor in May 2012.  |
| Rewriting the history of volcanic forcing during the past 2,000 years Posted: 06 Jul 2014 12:33 PM PDT Scientists have completed the most accurate and precise reconstruction to date of historic volcanic sulfate emissions in the Southern Hemisphere. The new record is derived from a large number of individual ice cores collected at locations across Antarctica and is the first annually resolved record extending through the Common Era.  |
| A dominant hemisphere for handedness and language? Posted: 04 Jul 2014 10:46 AM PDT Through an innovative approach using a large psychometric and brain imaging database, researchers have demonstrated that the location of language areas in the brain is independent of left- or right-handedness, except for a very small proportion of left-handed individuals whose right hemisphere is dominant for both manual work and language.  |
| Size of the human genome reduced to 19,000 genes Posted: 03 Jul 2014 08:28 AM PDT A new study updates the number of human genes to 19,000; 1,700 fewer than the genes in the most recent annotation, and well below the initial estimations of 100,000 genes. The work concludes that almost all of these genes have ancestors prior to the appearance of primates 50 million years ago.  |
