Proponents of genetically modified foods like to say there is broad consensus in the scientific community that GM foods are safe and benefit human health and the environment. Not so true. One scientist, Lisa Weasel, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and professor of biology at Portland State University in Oregon, has cast a skeptical eye at the GM food industry with her new book, Food Fray: Inside the Controversy over Genetically Modified Food.

Ms. Weasel received a National Science Foundation grant to research and publish her book. She spent five years researching and traveling the world to study the impacts of GM farming and food in the United States, Europe, India, Zambia, and Thailand.

He's really hot, really cold, maybe even a bit icy. He is the planet Mercury and this month he is ready for his extended close-up.

On Wednesday, NASA showed the first pictures taken by its Mercury Messenger spacecraft, which entered the planet's orbit on March 17.

Messenger will spend at least a year photographing, measuring and studying Mercury, which for now is the last frontier of planetary exploration.

''This is the last of the classical planets, the planets known to the astronomers of Egypt and Greece and Rome and the Far East,'' the principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said.

It ''captivated the imagination and the attention of astronomers for millennia'', Dr Solomon said, but science had never had such a front-row seat. ''We're there now.''

A Paraguayan judge said Thursday that private clinics refusing to treat dengue patients would face sanctions, as the public system was overcome by an epidemic that has left 18 dead since January.

"We can't leave people to die on the street. We have to respect human rights. We could be accused of failing to comply with international engagements," said Tadeo Zarratea, after ruling that private hospitals had to treat the sick.

Those who do not comply will be sanctioned and could be charged for failing to help, Zarratea said.

The health ministry would later pay for the services as it does in the public system, which has had to cancel operations in response to rising dengue cases.

Health authorities this week reported 13,000 cases and more than 1,000 patients hospitalized by the worst dengue epidemic in recent years in the South American nation.

A stink bug epidemic is on the rise here in the United States. It has been confirmed that the brown marmorated stink bug has now been found in 33 states in America, compared to only being found in 25 states as of last fall. These little stinkers have came a long way since they first appeared in Pennsylvania in 1998. Supposedly the bugs were accidentally transported in some cargo from their original feeding grounds in China. They're now even showing up as far west as California!

The bugs do not carry diseases nor are they poisonous. They do however emit an awful odor when smashed, hence the name stink bug! The real threat that these insects pose is the fact that they eat your vegetables and fruits, and can swarm in the thousands. According to the DailyMail, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $10 million trying to find a way to exterminate them but has so far been unsuccessful.

Although they aren't particularly fond of the comparison, scientists from the GOCE satellite team had to admit that new data showing Earth's gravity field - or geoid - makes our planet look like a rotating potato. After just two years in orbit, ESA's sleek and sexy GOCE satellite (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer) has gathered sufficient data to map Earth's gravity with unrivalled precision. While our world certainly doesn't look like a spinning tuber, this exaggerated view shows the most accurate model of how gravity varies across the planet.

The geoid is nothing more than how the oceans would vary if there were no other forces besides gravity acting on our planet.

"If we had an homogeneous sphere, it would be a boring sphere," said GOCE scientist Roland Pail from Technical University in Munich, speaking at the press briefing today. "But due to rotation, you get a flattening of the Earth, and we have topography such as mountains, and irregular mass distribution in Earth's interior. What we are showing you here, in principle, is the gravity field by any deviations due to inhomogeneous mass distributions on the Earth and the Earth's interior."

Four and a half billion years ago, a fluffy "snowball" coalesced out of the cloud of ice, dust and debris still surrounding our Sun. Most of the snowballs like it later merged to become the planets we know. This one, however, had a chance flyby with a young planet, probably Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity propelled it out into the far reaches of the Solar System, where it remained in deep freeze, among many others like it, as a member of the so-called Oort cloud.

Eventually, the tug of gravity from a passing star slowed it down ever so slightly, and that was enough to send it plummeting back toward the Sun, into the region where it had formed billions of years earlier. By a great quirk of irony Jupiter was again in its path. This time, the planet's gravity captured it into a long, elliptical orbit. On July 7, 1992, it executed a cosmic hole-in-one, passing through Jupiter's slender ring and breaking apart under the planet's ripping tides.

On the night of March 24, 1993, astronomers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy were searching the skies when they noted an oddly shaped blotch near Jupiter. It was a comet to be sure, but quite unusual in shape. The next morning it became known as Shoemaker-Levy 9, or SL9 for short. With additional detections, its prior history as a body disrupted by Jupiter became clear. As new data accumulated, however, SL9 became even more remarkable, because astronomers realized that it had evaded Jupiter for the last time. In July 1994, the world watched as the broken fragments of SL9 plunged into Jupiter one by one. Few comets are ever featured on the front page of the New York Times, but the July 19 headline read, "Earth-Sized Storm and Fireballs Shake Jupiter as a Comet Dies." SL9 went out with a bang. The impacts left behind blotches in Jupiter's clouds but, after a few months, they faded away. End of story.

Or so we thought. As we have just published in the journal Science Express, this story has an unexpected epilogue.

First of the parasitic parasites to be discovered in a natural environment points to hidden diversity.

A genomic survey of the microbial life in an Antarctic lake has revealed a new virophage - a virus that attacks viruses. The discovery suggests that these life forms are more common, and have a larger role in the environment, than was once thought.

An Australian research team found the virophage while surveying the extremely salty Organic Lake in eastern Antarctica. While sequencing the collective genome of microbes living in the surface waters, they discovered the virus, which they dubbed the Organic Lake Virophage (OLV).

The OLV genome was identified nestling within the sequences of phycodnaviruses - a group of giant viruses that attack algae. Evidence of gene exchange, and possible co-evolution, between the two suggests that OLV preys on the phycodnavirus. Although OLV is the dominant virophage in the lake, the work suggests others might be present.

By killing phycodnaviruses, the OLV might allow algae to thrive. Ricardo Cavicchioli, a microbiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues found that mathematical models of the Organic Lake system that took account of the virophage's toll on its host showed lower algal mortality and more blooms during the lake's two ice-free summer months.

"Our work reveals not only an amazing diversity in microbial life in this lake, but also how little we understand about the complexity of the biological functions at work," says Cavicchioli. The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science¹.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 devastated the Gulf of Mexico ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

"The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest," said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia."This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill."

The team focused their research on 14 species of cetacean, an order of mammals including whales and dolphins. While the number of recovered carcasses has been assumed to equal the number of deaths, the team argues that marine conditions and the fact that many deaths will have occurred far from shore mean recovered carcasses will only account for a small proportion of deaths.

To illustrate their point, the team multiplied recent species abundance estimates by the species mortality rate. An annual carcass recovery rate was then estimated by dividing the mean number of observed strandings each year by the estimate of annual mortality.

The team's analysis suggests that only 2% of cetacean carcasses were ever historically recovered after their deaths in this region, meaning that the true death toll from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of deaths currently estimated.

"This figure illustrates that carcass counts are hugely mis-leading, if used to measure the disaster's death toll," said co-author Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium "No study on carcass recovery from strandings has ever recovered anything close to 100% of the deaths occurring in any cetacean population. The highest rate we found was only 6.2%, which implied 16 deaths for every carcass recovered."

Saturn is sending out mixed signals in recent data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

Like a petulant adolescent, Saturn is sending out mixed signals.

Recent data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the variation in radio waves controlled by the planet's rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, the northern and southern rotational variations also appear to change with the Saturnian seasons, and the hemispheres have actually swapped rates. These two radio waves, converted to the human audio range, can be heard in a new video available online.

Early this morning, at 5:20 am EDT, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. The MESSENGER team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down. Tomorrow, March 30, at 2 pm EDT, attend the NASA media telecon to view more images from MESSENGER's first look at Mercury from orbit.

The dominant rayed crater in the upper portion of the image is Debussy. The smaller crater Matabei with its unusual dark rays is visible to the west of Debussy. The bottom portion of this image is near Mercury's south pole and includes a region of Mercury's surface not previously seen by spacecraft. Compare this image to the planned image footprint to see the region of newly imaged terrain, south of Debussy. Over the next three days, MESSENGER will acquire 1185 additional images in support of MDIS commissioning-phase activities. The year-long primary science phase of the mission will begin on April 4, and the orbital observation plan calls for MDIS to acquire more than 75,000 images in support of MESSENGER's science goals.