Titan's methane: Going, going, soon to be gone?

(Phys.org) —By tracking a part of the surface of Saturn's moon Titan over several years, NASA's Cassini mission has found a remarkable longevity to the hydrocarbon lakes on the moon's surface.

Gene invaders are stymied by a cell's genome defense

Gene wars rage inside our cells, with invading DNA regularly threatening to subvert our human blueprint. Now, building on Nobel-Prize-winning findings, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered a molecular machine that ...

Genomic hitchhikers in birds shed light on evolution of viruses

The genomes of birds are riddled with DNA sequences from viruses, according to a study to be published on October 16 in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Analysis of these viral ...

Nunavut's mysterious ancient life could return by 2100

Global climate change means that recently discovered ancient forests in Canada's extreme north could one day return, according to Alexandre Guertin-Pasquier of the University of Montreal's Department of Geography, who is ...

NREL catalyst brings drop-in fuels closer

We live in a petroleum-based society, and the oil we use comes from plants that were buried eons ago and changed under pressure and high temperatures. As countries across the globe face dwindling oil supplies and the environmental ...

Life in Antarctic lake? It's everywhere else

If scientists find microbes in a frigid lake two miles beneath the thick ice of Antarctica, it will illustrate once again that somehow life finds a way to survive in the strangest and harshest places.

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