Archive by date | October 2012

Could a moon of Uranus harbour an underground ocean?

Could a moon of Uranus harbour an underground ocean?

Since 2005, astrobiologists have considered Enceladus a possible haven for life, after the Cassini mission found that the icy moon of Saturn shoots out plumes of water through fissures in its crust. But planetary scientists Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and Julie Castillo-Rogez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are now turning their eyes to an even more distant Solar System locale: Ariel, a moon of Uranus that they think could also harbour an underground ocean.  Read more

US Senator Arlen Specter, NIH supporter, dead at 82 – Updated

US Senator Arlen Specter, NIH supporter, dead at 82 - Updated

Arlen Specter, a former US Senator from Pennsylvania and one of Washington’s biggest boosters of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), died today at age 82. He succumbed to complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), his son Shanin told media outlets including the New York Times.  Read more

Epigenetics inspires philosophical experiments

An artist's conception of epigenetic cloning

The man in the bowtie says he can transform you into anyone you want. At the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is applying his ‘experimental philosophy’ to epigenetics, one of the hottest and most rapidly advancing fields in biology. The art exhibit opened this weekend.  Read more

Criticism leveled at natural gas emissions study, part II

Criticism leveled at natural gas emissions study, part II

Back in February we wrote about a new estimate for methane emissions, based on air sampling, at a natural gas field in Colorado. Authored by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study suggested that methane emissions from this particular natural gas field might be significantly larger than commonly assumed. But the results also came under fire, and today the Journal of Geophysical Research posted a formal comment by Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations, who presents an alternate analysis that is in line with prior emissions estimates.  Read more