Breaking science news

NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

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An 'adopt-a-star' programme aims to raise money for an international research consortium to analyse data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission


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Militiamen are torturing and killing gay Iraqi men with impunity in a systematic campaign that has spread from Baghdad to several other cities, a prominent human rights group said in a report.
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Tao Weitao, a researcher in the College of Sciences' Department of Biology at the University of Texas at San Antonio is making great strides in a project that was funded one year ago by the San Antonio Area Foundation. The professor in the South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases is researching Acinetobacter baumannii, a soil-dwelling bacterium that threatens the health of military personnel in the Middle East and can also infect their family members once the soldiers have returned home following battle.
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In an advance toward the first portable device for detecting human bodies buried in disasters and at crime scenes, two Penn State forensic scientists report early results from a project to establish the chemical fingerprint of death. According to Dan Sykes, senior lecturer and director of analytical instructional laboratories at Penn State and the project's leader, "Acertaining a profile of the chemicals released from decomposing bodies could lead to a valuable new addition to the forensic toolkit: an electronic device that could determine the time elapsed since death quickly, accurately, and onsite." The team is presenting its research in a poster at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society at 7:00 p.m. on 16 August 2009.

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The iridescent beauty of pearl and nacre, the material found inside the shells of some molluscs, appears to be due to two recently discovered proteins, say Japanese researchers.
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Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was in the hospital on Sunday after he was attacked by a person using a metal pipe as the mayor and his family left the Wisconsin State Fair.
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