Not many grad students see the funny side of science. Meredith Carpenter and Lillian Fritz-Laylin, from the Molecular and Biology Department at UC Berkeley, not only see it but blog it. Their site, ncbirofl.com (National Center for Biotechnology Information, Rolling On the Floor Laughing), is a repository for absurd published scientific papers. Here is their top ten…

Vitamin D is vital in activating human defenses and low levels suffered by around half the world’s population may mean their immune systems’ killer T cells are poor at fighting infection, scientists said on Sunday.

The findings by Danish researchers could help the fight against infectious diseases and global epidemics, they said, and could be particularly useful in the search for new vaccines.

he warning was ominous, its predictions dire: Oceanographers issued a bulletin telling Hawaii and other Pacific islands that a killer wave was heading their way with terrifying force and that “urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property.”
But the devastating tidal surge predicted after Chile’s magnitude 8.8-earthquake for areas far from the epicenter never materialized. And by Sunday, authorities had lifted the warning after waves half the predicted size tickled the shores of Hawaii and tourists once again jammed beaches and restaurants.

Academics at a British climate research center at the center of a controversy about the science of global warming defended their work during cross-examination at Parliament Monday, rejecting allegations that they manipulated climate data.

A view of a superconducting solenoid magnet at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva. Scientists have restarted the world’s most powerful atom-smasher overnight, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said Sunday, as they launch a new bid to uncover the secrets of the universe.

LONDON/OSLO – Climate scientists must do more to work out how exceptionally cold winters or a dip in world temperatures fit their theories of global warming, if they are to persuade an increasingly skeptical public.

At stake is public belief that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, and political momentum to act as governments struggle to agree a climate treaty which could direct trillions of dollars into renewable energy, away from fossil fuels.

We’d like to think of ourselves as dynamic, unpredictable individuals, but according to new research, that’s not the case at all. In a study published in last week’s Science, researchers looked at customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time. These findings may be useful in multiple fields, including city planning, mobile communication resource management, and anticipating the spread of viruses.

Can a swimming pool’s worth of water power California for a year? The answer is yes, assuming all goes according to plan for scientists working on laser-driven fusion, said Ed Moses at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Moses spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, AAAS, on Sunday.

With all of the attention on nuclear power this week — due both to the $8.3 billion in loan guarantees awarded to build the first nuclear plants in the U.S. in almost three decades, as well as the attention Bill Gates is paying to nuclear project TerraPower — we’ve been mulling over the numbers for nuclear. There’s some very big numbers (it’s one of the most expensive clean power technologies out there) and some smaller figures (there’s been a recent industry focus on small reactors).

Here’s a look at nuclear power by the numbers — from big to small — with figures courtesy of the Energy Information Administration, the Wall Street Journal, Greentech Media and the Nuclear Energy Institute.

LONDON – Italian scientists said on Friday they had found evidence of how viruses helped change the course of human evolution and said their discovery could help in the design of better drugs and vaccines.

They found more than 400 different mutations in 139 genes that play a role in people’s risk of catching viruses — a finding that may also help explain why some people sail through flu season unscathed while others seem to catch every bug around.

Researchers from the Scientific Institute IRCCS, Milan University and the Politecnico di Milano analysed the genomes of 52 populations from different parts of the world with exposure to a wide range of viruses over 200,000 years of human evolution.