A team of researchers, led by Oregon State University anthropologist Deanna Kingston, has discovered a prehistoric village on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. The archaeological site, shown by carbon dating to be 800 to 900 years old, indicates that King Island, Alaska, was inhabited by a band of Inupiat walrus hunters for at least a millennium, said Kingston. The archaeological investigation is part of a four-year study of the plants, birds, place names, ... [full story]

A 20-year survey of conservation science shows a disturbing disconnect between the world’s most pressing ecological issues and what researchers are actually studying, with some less serious problems getting the most attention while more critical concerns get largely ignored. The study, conducted by scientists from Oregon State University and 10 other universities or agencies, was recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a professional journal. It showed that conservation biologists tend to study ... [full story]

This week, the crew aboard the International Space Station prepared for an unprecedented series of spacewalks. NASA astronauts Mike Lopez-Alegria and Suni Williams are scheduled to begin a 6.5-hour spacewalk from the station around 9 a.m. CST on Wednesday, Jan. 31. It will be the first of a record four spacewalks planned during the next month. Lopez-Alegria and Williams will conduct other spacewalks on Feb. 4, 8 and 22. The first three spacewalks will originate ... [full story]

BRAIN SWEAT WHAT IS IT? - This is a scanning electron micrograph of the interior of a cabbage butterfly's proboscis, a long, flexible feeding tube. CNS Photo. ELECTRON INK - You can find out the names of hundreds of geological features and where they're found in the solar system at http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov. CNS Photo. ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE - In 1931, the famously portly Winston Churchill was hit by a taxi on Fifth Avenue in New York and taken to ... [full story]

New research conducted by the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University reveals how individual cells perceive and decode communication signals, much like a radio tunes in individual radio stations. The research helps explain how intra-cellular communications are received and understood by cells. The findings are to be printed in the FASEB Journal, which is published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. The article currently is published online."While ... [full story]

A male fish can size up po­ten­tial ri­vals, rank­ing them from strongest to weak­est, just by watch­ing how they per­form in fights with oth­er ma­les, ac­cord­ing to a new stu­dy.The re­search­ers say their finding pro­vides the first di­rect ev­i­dence that fish, like peo­ple, can use log­ic to learn their place in a peck­ing or­der. The stu­dy, pub­lished in the Jan. 25 edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture, in­volved ci­ch­lids (SIK-lids), small ter­ri­to­rial fish from Af­ri­ca.  ... [full story]

America's Youngest Scientists and Engineers Show What They Know More than 17,000 middle school and high school students from 42 states begin a journey this month that they hope will take them to the National Finals of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Science Bowl(R). The National Science Bowl tests teams in all areas of science and math using a fast-paced question and answer format similar to Jeopardy. It is the only educational ... [full story]

'TRUE FACTS' Each year in the United States, coffins and burial vaults result in more metal being put in the ground than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit. TRUE FACTS - Each year in the United States, coffins and burial vaults result in more metal being put in the ground than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge, and ... [full story]

Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement this afternoon announcing plans to create a Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the U.S. House of Representatives: "Later this afternoon, the House will pass legislation that ends taxpayer-funded subsidies for Big Oil and creates a Strategic Energy and Renewables Reserve. For America to be safe and strong, we must take further decisive action now to free our country of its dependence on foreign energy ... [full story]

For Jill Tarter, the revelation came when she was a child walking on a Florida Keys beach with her father. "I remember just looking and thinking that up there, somewhere around one of those stars, there's another little girl walking on the beach with her dad," Tarter said. How could there not be, when the stars in the sky are as common as the grains of sand beneath her feet? Tarter is now director of ... [full story]

Re­search­ers say they’ve learn­ed a sur­pris­ing fact about cell di­vi­sion that might help ex­plain how we be­come asym­met­ric—with the heart on the left, and two dif­fer­ent brain halves, for in­stance. It seems that when cells di­vide, they some­times dis­t­rib­ute their DNA dif­fer­ently among “daugh­ter” cells, said Amar J. S. Klar of the Na­tion­al Can­cer In­s­ti­tute at Fred­er­ick, Md.  The left-right dy­nein is one of 12 pro­teins form­ing the dy­nein mo­tor, a ti­ny ma­chine that per­forms trans­por­ta­tion ... [full story]

BRAIN SWEAT If you randomly glance at your watch, what are the odds that the time will contain consecutive digits, such as 1:23? VERBATIM "Ants can carry 20 times their own body weight, which is useful information if you're moving and you need help carrying a potato chip across town." - Ron Darian, screenwriter and actor VERBATIM - 'Ants can carry 20 times their own body weight, which is useful information if you're moving and ... [full story]

Al­bert Ein­stein the­o­rized long ago that mov­ing things would warp the fab­ric of space and time, which ac­cord­ing to his find­ings are unit­ed as a four-di­men­sional space-time. As the ob­jects trav­eled, they would al­so em­a­nate rip­ples of grav­i­ty called grav­i­ta­tion­al waves. No one has de­tected that yet, but some re­search­ers be­lieve they could find such waves com­ing from strange, wispy cos­mic struc­tures called su­per­strings. Cos­mic su­per­strings are the­o­rized to wig­gle and os­cil­late, pro­duc­ing grav­i­ta­tion­al waves, and ... [full story]