Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a microRNA molecule as a surprisingly crucial player in managing cell survival and growth. The findings, published in the October 7 issue of Cell Metabolism, underscore the emerging recognition that non-coding RNAs - small molecules that are not translated into working proteins - help regulate basic cellular processes and may be key to developing new drugs and therapies.

Specifically, principal investigator Albert R. La Spada, MD, PhD, professor of cellular and molecular medicine, chief of the Division of Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics and associate director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at UC San Diego, and colleagues found that a microRNA known as let-7 controls autophagy through the amino acid sensing pathway, which has emerged as the most potent activator of mTORC1 complex activity.

Autophagy is a fundamental process used by cells to degrade unnecessary components in times of starvation, releasing energy stores that help promote cell survival. Cells have further adapted autophagy for other purposes as well, including recycling dysfunctional components, immune response to pathogen invasion, surveillance against cancer and maintenance of protein and organelle control in the central nervous system. MTORC1 is a critical protein complex that regulates energy consumption and growth in cells.

There was little need, before, to know exactly how much dust peppers outer space, far from the plane of the Milky Way. Scientists understood that the dimly radiating grains aligned with our galaxy's magnetic field and that the field's twists and turns gave a subtle swirl to the dust glow. But those swirls were too faint to see. Only since March, when researchers claimed to have glimpsed the edge of space and time with a fantastically sensitive telescope, has the dust demanded a reckoning. For, like a cuckoo egg masquerading in a warbler's nest, its pattern mimics a predicted signal from the Big Bang.

Now, scientists have shown that the swirl pattern touted as evidence of primordial gravitational waves - ripples in space and time dating to the universe's explosive birth - could instead all come from magnetically aligned dust. A new analysis of data from the Planck space telescope has concluded that the tiny silicate and carbonate particles spewed into interstellar space by dying stars could account for as much as 100 percent of the signal detected by the BICEP2 telescope and announced to great fanfare this spring.

The Planck analysis is "relatively definitive in that we can't exclude that the entirety of our signal is from dust," said Brian Keating, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the BICEP2 collaboration.

"We were, of course, disappointed," said Planck team member Jonathan Aumont of the Université Paris-Sud.

For some, coffee is the true nectar of the gods, while others won't touch a drop of the stuff. Now, a new study reveals how genes influence people's preferences for a cup o' Joe.

Researchers analyzed genetic data from studies of more than 120,000 coffee drinkers of European and African-American ancestry. They found eight locations of the human genome linked with coffee drinking, six of which had never been linked to consumption of the beverage before, according to the study, published today (Oct. 7) in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The findings further boost the idea that a hit of caffeine is what motivates regular coffee consumption, and could explain why the same amount of coffee or caffeine can have enormously different effects on different people.

"Coffee, a major dietary source of caffeine, is among the most widely consumed beverages in the world and has received considerable attention regarding health risks and benefits," the researchers wrote in the study.

Research consistently suggests that drinking coffee is linked to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, liver disease and Parkinson's disease, the researchers said. However, the effects of coffee on cancer risk, cardiovascular health, pregnancy and other conditions remain unclear.

What is a planet? For generations of kids the answer was easy. A big ball of rock or gas that orbited our Sun, and there were nine of them in our solar system. But then astronomers started finding more Pluto-sized objects orbiting beyond Neptune. Then they found Jupiter-sized objects circling distant stars, first by the handful and then by the hundreds. Suddenly the answer wasn't so easy. Were all these newfound things planets?

Since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is in charge of naming these newly discovered worlds, they tackled the question at their 2006 meeting. They tried to come up with a definition of a planet that everyone could agree on. But the astronomers couldn't agree. In the end, they voted and picked a definition that they thought would work.

The current, official definition says that a planet is a celestial body that:

1. is in orbit around the Sun,
2. is round or nearly round, and
3. has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.

But this definition baffled the public and classrooms around the country. For one thing, it only applied to planets in our solar system. What about all those exoplanets orbiting other stars? Are they planets? And Pluto was booted from the planet club and called a dwarf planet. Is a dwarf planet a small planet? Not according to the IAU. Even though a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree, and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.

Eight years later, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics decided to revisit the question of "what is a planet?" On September 18th, we hosted a debate among three leading experts in planetary science, each of whom presented their case as to what a planet is or isn't. The goal: to find a definition that the eager public audience could agree on!

The frequency with which we use different words changes all the time, new words are invented or fall out of use. Yet little is known about the dynamics of lexical change across languages. Researchers of Kazan Federal University in Russia and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now studied the lexical evolution of English in comparison to Russian, German, French, Spanish and Italian using the Google Books N-Gram Corpus. They found that major societal transformations such as wars cause faster changes in word frequency distributions, whereas lexical evolution is dampened during times of stability, such as the Victorian Era.

Furthermore, the researchers found British and American English to drift apart during the first half of the 20th century, but then begin to re-converge, likely due to the mass media. Apart from these peculiarities, however, the researchers also find similar rates of change across languages at larger time scales, revealing universal trends governing lexical evolution.

The lexicon of a language reflects the world of its speakers. Accordingly, changes in the lexicon of a language reflect changes in the environment. In their current study Søren Wichmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and his collaborators of Kazan Federal University studied the dynamics of lexical evolution over time and across languages. To this aim the researchers used the Google Books N-Gram Corpus to monitor word usage during the past five centuries. Wichmann and colleagues focused on single words, so-called 1-grams, from six different languages and looked specifically at how frequently these words were used year by year.

The meteorite that hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15, 2013, was the cause of a large number of dynamic ionospheric, atmospheric and seismic phenomena. Oleg Berngardt of the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia, presents the properties of ionospheric irregularities elongated with the Earth's magnetic field during the first 25 minutes after the impact. The irregularities were observed by the EKB radar of Russian segment of the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), an international radar network for studying the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. "It is shown that 40 minutes before meteor fall, the EKB radar started to observe powerful scattering from irregularities elongated with the Earth magnetic field in the F-layer. Scattering was observed for 80 minutes and stopped 40 minutes after the meteorite fall," Berngardt writes in a paper.

The researcher reveals that during 9-15 minutes after the meteorite fall at ranges 400-1200 km from the explosion site, changes were observed in the spectral and amplitude characteristics of the scattered signal. The features were the sharp increase in the Doppler frequency shift of the scattered signal corresponding to the Doppler velocities of about 600 m/s and the sharp increase of the scattered signal amplitude. "This allows us to conclude that we detected the growth of small-scale ionospheric irregularities elongated with the Earth magnetic field at E-layer heights," Berngardt explains. "Joint analysis with the seismic data and numerical modeling shows that the observed effect is connected with the passage of secondary acoustic front formed by supersonic seismic ground wave from the 'Chelyabinsk' meteorite."

If you missed April's total eclipse of the moon, now's your chance. But you'll need to get up early.

Wednesday morning, if the skies are clear, North Americans will have prime viewing of a full lunar eclipse, especially in the West. The full moon will be obscured by Earth's shadow in the predawn hours. The total eclipse will last an hour - until sunrise on the East Coast.

It also will be visible across Australia and much of Asia. Only Europe, Africa and the eastern tip of Brazil won't get the show.

The moon will appear orange or red, the result of sunlight scattering off Earth's atmosphere. That's why it's called a blood moon.

There'll be two full lunar eclipses again next year.

Just because you can talk to your car doesn't mean you should. Two new studies have found that voice-activated smartphones and dashboard infotainment systems may be making the distracted-driving problem worse instead of better.

The systems let drivers do things like tune the radio, send a text message or make a phone call while keeping their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel, but many of these systems are so error-prone or complex that they require more concentration from drivers rather than less, according to studies released Tuesday by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the University of Utah.

One study examined infotainment systems in some of the most common auto brands on the road: Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Hyundai and Mercedes. The second study tested the Apple iPhone's Siri voice system to navigate, send texts, make Facebook and Twitter posts and use the calendar without handling or looking at the phone. Apple and Google are working with automakers to mesh smartphones with infotainment systems so drivers can bring their apps, navigation and music files into their cars.

The voice-activated systems were graded on a distraction scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing no distraction and 5 comparable to doing complex math problems and word memorization.

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There is only one piece of US climate data which correlates with CO2 - the amount of data tampering NCDC is applying to US temperature.

Undulatus asperatus isn't some obscure anatomical structure next to your peritoneum, nor is it a minor character from the movie Gladiator.

No, it's actually a type of cloud formation that weather fanciers have proposed for inclusion in the next edition of the World Meteorological Organization's "International Cloud Atlas," the ultimate reference source on the varieties of clouds.

Undulatus asperatus is Latin for "agitated waves," and it basically resembles an enormous, rumpled blanket stretched out across the sky. If accepted into the atlas, it would be the first newly designated cloud formation since 1951. Below is a strikingly beautiful video of an Undulatus asperatus formation, recorded by cloud watcher Alex Schueth over Lincoln, Neb., on July 9.