Science News

A respected international scientific body will review the UNs Nobel prize-winning climate panel, under fire for errors in a key report on global warming, UN chief Ban Ki-moon has said.

Ban however defended the work of the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been criticized for his stewardship of the body.

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Honeycreeper birds, a fly and several ferns, trees and shrubs found only on a Hawaiian island were among 48 species added Wednesday to the endangered species list, boosting the number of such classifications by the Obama administration from two to 50.

Previously, the service tried to protect endangered species by adopting separate plans to revive their respective habitats.

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A restaurant in Santa Monica, California faces criminal charges after being accused of selling sushi made from whale meat, the sale of which is strictly banned in the United States, prosecutors said.

Yamamoto faces up to a year in prison and the charges also carry a fine of up to 200,000 dollars for the restaurant and 100,000 for the chef.

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Children inherit about 30 mutated genes from each parent, fewer than had been thought, but enough in at least one case to pass on inherited illnesses, according to a first detailed look at the blueprint for human life in a family.

The blueprint for life, called DNA, contains about 22,000 genes, and researchers calculated the number of changes by analyzing the genes of a mother, father, and their son and daughter.

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A mold-resistant bean, a German pink tomato and a wild strawberry plucked from the flanks of a Russian volcano are just some of the crops whose seeds are being tucked away this week in a giant vault dug out of a mountainside of the Norwegian island Svalbard.

“Reaching the half million mark brings mixed emotions, because while it shows that the vault at Svalbard is now the gold standard for diversity, it comes at a time when our agriculture systems are really sitting on a knifes edge,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which partners with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden in operating the vault.

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China has selected two military air transport pilots as its first female astronauts, the countrys state media reported Wednesday. The only hitch? The women had to be hitched as in married to make the cut.

“In the selection, we had almost the same requirements on women candidates as those for men, but the only difference was that they must be married, as we believe married women would be more physically and psychologically mature,” Xinhua quoted Zhang as saying during a break at an annual parliamentary session.

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As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time - the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries.

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American scientists have for the first time unlocked the genetic code of an entire family, and made a startling discovery — that parents pass on fewer mutations than previously thought.

But the result of research by a team at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and the University of Utah found this was nowhere near the case, according to their study published in Thursdays edition of Science Express.

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Reports of sudden acceleration in the Toyota Prius have spiked across the country. But that doesn’t mean there’s an epidemic of bad gas pedals in the popular hybrid.

“When people expect problems, they’re more likely to find them,” said Lars Perner, a professor of clinical marketing at Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California.

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Lifelock, one of a legion of identity theft protection service companies, made a name for itself by plastering its CEO Todd Davis social security number all over company advertisements.

Fortunately, not all identify theft protection services are created equal, and some do work harder and more comprehensively than others to safeguard their clients finances and reputations.

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