With a significant portion of the world's population living within close proximity to the oceans, often in large cities, rising sea levels bring the potential for devastating consequences.

But scientists are still unable to make predictions precise enough for people to plan how to handle the loss of land and threat to coastal communities expected over this century, two researchers point out in a commentary this week in the May 4 issue of the journal Science.

"We know sea level is going to rise, but how much, and how fast, and where, we really still don't know," co-author Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told LiveScience.

The complex seas

It turns out the ocean isn't like water in a bathtub; it doesn't rise uniformly as more water pours in. As global warming raises sea levels, some places are expected to see higher-than-average increases, and a few places may even see decreases.

Currently, projections suggest that over the course of this century, sea levels will rise between 8 inches and 6.6 feet (20 centimeters and 2 meters) around the planet. Scientists know this increase will be driven by the expansion of water as it warms (warmer water takes up more space) and the melting of ice, most importantly, ice stored in the massive ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica.

Scientists who created a mutant virus to explore a key aspect of influenza published their research Wednesday after a four-month storm that brewed fears of bioterrorism and accusations of censorship.

The controversy began in December when teams in the United States and the Netherlands separately said they had engineered a hybrid virus in high-security labs.

Their goal was to understand how a highly lethal strain of flu which spreads among birds but is hard to transmit to mammals could mutate into a variant that is contagious among humans.

The distinctive ridge around Saturn's moon Iapetus bears an eerie similarity to equatorial ridges around concretions on Earth. In electrical terms, the similarity could be more than coincidence.

Traditional thinking in the sciences would not recognize a significant pattern above, though the three objects reveal an odd similarity. Each sphere possesses an equatorial ridge. But surely the two objects on the right could tell us nothing about the origins of the object on the left!

Astronomers assure us that Saturn's moon Iapetus arose from the "circumstellar cloud" that gave birth to the Sun, planets, moons, and all of the lesser objects of the solar system. The critical event was the "gravitational collapse" of the primordial cloud billions of years ago. Since that event, little has changed in the make-up or in the celestial mechanics of the solar system.

Iapetus is a puzzle, however. The pronounced ridge around its equator has no place in the theory of gravitationally collapsing clouds.

Discovery Date: April 27, 2012

Magnitude: 21.6 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-H94.

Discovery Date: April 29, 2012

Magnitude: 18.6 mag

Discoverer: Robert H. McNaught (Siding Spring)

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-J11.

Residents of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific have some of the darkest skin seen outside of Africa. They also have the highest occurrence of blond hair seen in any population outside of Europe. Now, researchers have found the single gene that explains these fair tresses.

A single mutation is responsible for almost half of the variation in Solomon Islanders' hair color, the scientists reported Thursday (May 3) in the journal Science. Most strikingly, this gene mutation seems to have arisen in the Pacific, not been brought in by fair-haired Europeans intermarrying with islanders.

"[T]he human characteristic of blond hair arose independently in equatorial Oceania," study researcher Eimear Kenny, a postodoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said in a statement. "That's quite unexpected and fascinating."

Kenny and her colleagues traveled to the remote Solomon islands, where study co-author Sean Myles, now a professor at Nova Scotia Agricultural College, had previously noted a surprising number of blonds.

"They have this very dark skin and bright blond hair. It was mind-blowing," Myles said in a statement. "As a geneticist on the beach watching the kids playing, you count up the frequency of kids with blond hair, and say, 'Wow, it's 5 to 10 percent.'"

That's not very far off from the proportion of blond-haired people in Europe, Kenny said. The researchers gathered saliva from 43 blond and 42 dark-haired Solomon Islanders to analyze for clues to the genes behind their hair color.

Rice with human genes will soon be grown in Kansas.

Rice engineered to contain human genes will be grown for the first time outdoors instead of in a laboratory, bringing it one step closer to commercial production, according to The Washington Post. The genes that the California-based biotechnology company Ventria Bioscience has infused into rice enable the plant to produce bacteria-fighting proteins found in human breast milk and saliva. "We can really help children with diarrhea get better faster," Scott E. Deeter, the company's president and chief executive, explained of the product.

But many consumer groups are worried the engineered rice will do more harm than good. Genetically modified (GM) plants have a history of migrating out of their target plots and contaminating other plants, critics note, and it would be difficult to control the doses of human proteins that people purposely or inadvertently take in. "This is not a product that everyone would want to consume," Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists told the Post. "It is unwise to produce drugs in plants outdoors."

A study in Peru sponsored by Ventria Bioscience demonstrated that children with severe diarrhea recovered a day and a half faster when taking fluids that contained the proteins. But this does not make the rice a "silver bullet" for combating diarrhea in developing countries, experts say. "There's no guarantee that the public will use this in poorer nations, as patent issues have obstructed altruistic biotech applications before," notes Worldwatch Institute researcher Brian Halweil.

And, according to Halweil's colleague Danielle Nierenberg, "most of these GM-enhanced varieties of crops don't really address the root problems of poverty and disease." Every year, over one million infants and children die from diseases associated with inadequate water and sanitation, and hundreds of millions of people are "debilitated" by illness, pain, and discomfort, authors David Satterthwaite and Gordon McGranahan write in Worldwatch's State of the World 2007 report.

"Instead of pushing these products on poor consumers who lack the financial ability to say 'no' to GM plants, the money invested in developing these crops could go to broader goals like providing clean water and sanitation to prevent the very diseases these crops are created to treat," Nierenberg says.

Proteins are the building blocks of life. They are the structural parts that give cells shape, the enzymes that build or break down the molecules of life, the motors that transport things, the agents that send signals and regulate the activity of other proteins and genes, and the morphogens that help determine the development of the organism.

What determines a protein's activity and properties? Its shape. And what determines its shape? The way its one-dimensional string of amino acids folds together. This is a complex process involving many interactions, so complex that we cannot reliably predict a protein's structure based on its sequence.

A NASA space telescope has detected an incredible energy burst from a distant black hole, an explosion so intense that it boosted the black hole's X-ray brightness by at least 3,000 times, scientists say. The outburst came from a black hole in the spiral galaxy M83, about 15 million light-years away from Earth. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers found a new object, called an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), that emits more X-rays than most "normal" systems in which a companion star orbits around a black hole or neutron star, the researchers said.

Algol, aka the Demon Star, is actually a binary star in the Perseus constellation, and has been discovered by a group of Finnish researchers to be first noted by the Egyptians some 3200 years ago. It is one of the best known eclipsing binaries, the first such star to be discovered, and also one of the first (non-nova) variable stars to be discovered.

The eclipses in binary stars give precise information of orbital period changes. Alogl brightens and dims every 2.867 days, a phenomenon first described in semi-modern western astronomy by John Goodricke, who wrote about what he saw with the naked eye back in 1783.

The irregular orbital period changes of this longest known eclipsing binary continues to puzzle astronomers. The mass transfer between the two members of this binary should cause a long-term increase of the orbital period, but observations over two centuries have not confirmed this effect.