Science

A team of New York University biologists has found that a series of genes sequentially expressed in brain stem cells control the generation of neural diversity in visual system of fruit flies. Their results are reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

Microsoft on Wednesday posted bounties of up to $100,000 for "truly novel" ways to hack the latest version of its Windows software for powering computers.

Long before plants and animals inhabited the earth, when life consisted of single-celled organisms afloat in a planet-wide sea, bacteria invaded these organisms and took up permanent residence. One bacterium eventually became the mitochondria that today power all plant and animal cells; another became the chloroplast that turns sunlight into energy in green plants.

Taking part in the largest U.S. air quality field project in decades, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is working with partners to study pollution in the Southeast. The study looks at the impact of chemical reactions occurring between human-related pollution and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from vegetation.

Using data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, scientists believe they have solved a mystery from one of the solar system's coldest regions—a permanently shadowed crater on the moon. They have explained how energetic particles penetrating lunar soil can create molecular hydrogen from water ice. The finding provides insight into how radiation can change the chemistry of water ice throughout the solar system.

In a scientific paper published in the journal Polar Biology, researchers report using DNA from tissues samples collected in 1955 to study what may be a new type of killer whale (Orcinus orca).

Today, I'm starting a new blog series written from Foldøy, a tiny island in south west Norway which will be my home for two months. In this first post, I'll show you how to deliver zoomable high-resolution images with Leaflet. I've brought 17 kg of mapping and visualization books to keep me occupied: Zoom in of you want to see the details! You don't really need Leaflet to create images like this, as Zoomify provides both Flash and HTML5 viewers. I'm using Leaflet to create an open source alternative, and to learn more about tiling schemes. The code is available on GitHub as a Leaflet plugin. The Zoomify tile format is similar to popular map tiling schemes. The image is stored like a pyramid of multiple jpeg tiles at different resolutions or zoom levels. The tile size is 256 x 256 px and there are 256 tiles in each folder.

Virtual reality is rising from the dead thanks to a start-up with global ambitions and crowdfunded technology to back them. Pleased to meet you, Oculus Rift

Today in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT's Media Lab report a new approach to generating holograms that could lead to color holographic-video displays that are much cheaper to manufacture than today's experimental, monochromatic displays. The same technique could also increase the resolution of conventional 2-D displays.

Many proteins work like Swiss Army knives, fitting multiple functions into their elaborately folded structures. A bit mysteriously, some proteins manage to multitask even with structures that are unfolded and floppy—"intrinsically disordered." In this week's issue of Nature, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) report their discovery of an important trick that a well-known intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) uses to expand and control its functionality.