The unique genomic signature could serve as a research model for founding events.

This news release is available in French.

Researchers at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center and University of Montreal have discovered that the genomic signature inherited by today's 6 million French Canadians from the first 8,500 French settlers who colonized New France some 400 years ago has gone through an unparalleled change in human history, in a remarkably short timescale. This unique signature could serve as an ideal model to study the effect of demographic processes on human genetic diversity, including the identification of possibly damaging mutations associated with population-specific diseases.

Until now, changes in the relative proportion of rare mutations, that could be both detrimental and adaptive, had only been shown over relatively long timescales, by comparing African and European populations. According to Dr. Alan Hodgkinson, the co-first author of an article published online in PLOS Genetics recently and a postdoctoral fellow, "through this first in-depth genomic analysis of more than a hundred French Canadians, we have been surprised to find that in less than 20 generations, the distribution and relative proportion of rare, potentially damaging variants have changed more than we anticipated."

In the last year there has been a push in both the United Kingdom and the United States for permission to create children with three genetic parents. This technique, often called mitochondrial replacement (MR), is presented as a simple switching out the mitochondria in the eggs of women with mitochondrial disease. We inherit all of our mitochondria from our mother, so a woman with mitochondrial disease cannot help but pass that onto her offspring.

In reality, the technique is far from simple. The nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of the woman with mitochrondrial disease. This creates a genetically-engineered egg where the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cytoplasm of the egg is from the donor and the nuclear DNA, the chromosomes we all learned about in biology, is from the woman with the mitochondrial disease.

The embryos created with IVF using these genetically-engineered eggs have the nuclear DNA of a woman and a man, like all other embryos, but would also have the mitochondrial DNA of the woman who donated the egg. These children would have the genetic material from three individuals.

In addition, these genetically-engineered children, well at least the girls, could not help but pass this engineering onto their offspring. This is a modification that would affect generations.

As the U.S. government shutdown grinds through its fourth day, science projects are falling like flies as they get starved of funds. And now, one of the most symbolic of scientific institutions has become the latest casualty of the political ineptitude on Capitol Hill.

Today, as of 7pm Eastern Time, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (site offline) will shut down all of its North American facilities. This includes the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) in New Mexico, plus the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. Apart from a skeleton crew that will remain behind as security for the radio antennae, the vast majority of the NRAO's 475 employees will be laid off in an unpaid furlough.

The following script is from "Cosmic Roulette" which aired on Oct. 6, 2013. The correspondent is Anderson Cooper. Andy Court, producer.


For a long time, astronomers saw the asteroids and comets that come close to Earth as useless debris -- space rocks that blocked our view of distant galaxies. Not anymore. They're now viewed as scientifically important and potentially very dangerous if they were to collide with our planet. The odds of that happening on any given day are remote, but over millions of years scientists believe there have been lots of impacts, and few doubt there are more to come. A former astronaut told us it's like a game of "cosmic roulette," and one mankind cannot afford to lose.

Concern over our ability to detect these objects that come near the Earth grew after an incident in Russia this February, when an asteroid crashed into the atmosphere with many times the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, narrowly missing a city of one million.

This is video of that asteroid in Russia, barreling toward Earth at 40,000 miles an hour. It exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of Chelyabinsk. People thought it had missed them entirely, until minutes later, when the shock wave arrived. Shattering glass, crushing doors, and knocking some people right off their feet. More than a thousand were injured.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected.Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured. But Science's investigation casts a powerful light. Internet Protocol (IP) address traces within the raw headers of e-mails sent by journal editors betray their locations. Invoices for publication fees reveal a network of bank accounts based mostly in the developing world. And the acceptances and rejections of the paper provide the first global snapshot of peer review across the open-access scientific enterprise.

One might have expected credible peer review at the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals. It describes itself as "a peer reviewed journal aiming to communicate high quality research articles, short communications, and reviews in the field of natural products with desired pharmacological activities." The editors and advisory board members are pharmaceutical science professors at universities around the world.

In Frankenstein, a mad scientist puts together a man by sewing together dead human parts. One of those parts is a head. It seems like a far-fetched notion, but Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group believes that with new strides in technology, a human head could be transplanted from one body to another in the very near future.

To quote Young Frankenstein, are we "entering the realm of genius," or of madness? Head transplants are hardly a new concept, but the idea of it actually being possible has been up for debate. The main problem with the concept is that it is would be very difficult to connect a head to a different body's spinal cord. However, Canavero believes that with the recent creation of something called fusogens, the process is now possible. Fusogens, which are plastic membranes, were created to repair severed nerves. They allow nerve impulses to be transmitted to the donor nervous system.

It sounds crazy, but Canavero believes that a full head transplant could be possible within just a few years. Even crazier? He's already figured out how to do it. In 2008, he used electrical stimulation to wake up a patient who had been in a coma for two years. He bases his own theories on those of Robert White, a neurosurgeon who transplanted a monkey's head in the 1970's. The procedure would begin with two bodies: the donor, and the recipient. Both bodies would be chilled to a certain temperature. Two surgeons would cut their spinal cords at the same time. The donated head would be immediately put on the recipient's body and, using fusogens, be attached to the recipient's spinal cord.

Discovery Date: September 28, 2013

Magnitude: 19.0 mag

Discoverer: Catalina Sky Survey
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-T27.

Have you heard of the Leidenfrost effect? If not, it's about to be your favorite effect. If yes, same.

The basic idea is, when a liquid comes in contact with something really hot--about twice as hot as the liquid's boiling point, although it changes on certain factors like the size of the drop--the liquid never comes in direct contact with the surface; vapor acts as a barrier that keeps the two separated. When you flick drops of water on to a pan to check the heat, that skittering you see and hear is because of this effect.

Got it? Great. One more thing: by using a surface with jagged edges, you can control the direction the water moves in. (You know those tire traps that slash your wheels when you reverse? They're sort of like that.) That's what University of Bath undergraduate students Carmen Cheng and Matthew Guy did when they created this Leidenfrost maze. Without giving away too much, it's the coolest science-y thing you'll see today.

If it were not scientifically verified, it would be a great storyline for a sci-fi flick, but NASA says alien microbes are hitching rides on meteorites. Some experts are stating that debris from outer space will only be increasing in frequency as they impact Earth in the coming year.

A meteorite's size can range from small to extremely large. When a meteoroid enters the atmosphere, frictional, pressure, and chemical interactions with the atmospheric gases cause the body to heat up and emit light, thus forming a fireball, also known as a meteor or shooting/falling star. They can range from extraterrestrial bodies that collide with Earth or an exceptionally bright, fireball-like meteor regardless of whether it ultimately impacts the surface.

NASA has launched a new website to share details of meteor explosion events as recorded by U.S. military sensors on secretive spacecraft, kicking off the project with new details of this past February's fireball over Chelyabinsk, Russia.

The new "Fireball and Bolide Reports" website, overseen by NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, debuted Friday (March 1) with its first entry: a table with a chronological data summary of the Russian meteor explosion of Feb. 15 gleaned from U.S. Government sensor data. Scientists are calling the event a "superbolide," taken from the term "bolide" typically used for fireballs created by meteors.

Part of the worldwide interest in meteors hitting Earth stems from what is now verifiable evidence that alien lifeforms are coming along for the ride.

In 2010, Duane P. Snyder announced the discovery of the first and only known Ice Meteorite containing Extraterrestrial Life-forms. The Ice Meteorite's particle analysis, its gas analysis, and likely origin including photos of the life-forms found in the melt-water of the meteorite where also exhibited. Dr. Albert Schnieders of Tascon USA Inc, commented that they basically found nearly all elements up to 90u in the sample spherical particles tested.

Scientists have discovered the body clock 'reset button', taking them one step closer to tweaking the clock in order to make jet lag and shift work less painful.

The findings could reduce the symptoms of travelling through different time zones and working unsociable hours, which often makes people either tired or unable to sleep. Results from the study, published in journal Science, suggest the newly-found button could be used to switch the master clock to a new time zone, for example from London to Beijing, in just one day.

A team based at Kyoto University in Japan discovered the 'reset button' in the brain. There are clocks located throughout the body but the master clock is found within the brain, where it works to keep the body in tune with the world around us, creating fatigue at night and alertness during daylight.

The clock uses light to monitor time, but adjusts slowly. For every time zone travelled, it takes the body approximately a full day to catch up, according to the BBC.

Shift work or long haul flights disrupt sleep and hunger patterns, as the body clock falls out of tune with the rising and setting of the sun.