science

On a large screen inside a packed Snohomish County courtroom, in Washington, a young Canadian couple smiled out at the dimmed room from the relaxed, faded scene of a party. It was the last known picture taken of Tanya Van Cuylenberg and Jay Cook together before they disappeared in November 1987. Their bodies were discovered days after they went missing, more than 60 miles apart. Thirty-one years later, William Talbott II is now standing trial as the first person to be accused of the double murder. In their opening statements on Friday, attorneys on both sides traced the teenagers’ last-known movements through ferry ticket stubs, deli receipts, and forgotten travelers’ checks. They catalogued the many dead ends pursued by police; and finally, the break last year provided by a DNA link to Talbott’s genealogy-curious relatives. Since then, law enforcement’s use of public ancestry websites has led to arrests in dozens of other cold cases and will likely show up in … [Read more...] about Lawyers in a Murder Trial Clash Over a DNA Forensics Method

It was just after midnight at mission control center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Carl Sagan was exuberant. The Voyager 2 spacecraft had just completed its decade-long mission by making its closest pass to Neptune, before continuing on into interstellar space. It was the first—and so far only—spacecraft to visit the mysterious blue ice giant lurking at the edge of the solar system. “We are looking at the frontier of the solar system, the last planet,” Sagan told a CNN television crew that had assembled for the occasion. “The level of excitement is the highest I’ve ever seen here.” Before Voyager 2 made its pass just 3,000 miles above Neptune's atmosphere on August 25, 1989, scientists knew next to nothing about the place. What they found was a planet covered in dense, methane-rich clouds that whipped around Neptune at more than 1,000 miles per hour, making it the windiest spot in the solar system. At the time, the planet was … [Read more...] about Neptune Is a Windy, Chilly, and Baffling Planet. Let’s Go!

This story is part of a series on how we clean—from organizing your house to washing your tuchus. Of all the existential intergalactic threats ever faced by the crew of the starship Enterprise, perhaps none burns more brightly in the minds of classic Star Trek fans than the gaping, antiproton-beam-backlit maw of the Planet Killer. What could be more memorable, after all, than a miles-long, barrel-shaped machine that prowls through space, inhaling planets through one end and chopping them into rubble to be expelled out the other? Now imagine a microscopic version of that and you’ve got yourself a proteasome, one of the most essential molecular machines inside the human body. Instead of breaking down planets though, it hacks apart proteins. This tubular apparatus of orderly extermination is essentially a cellular garbage disposal, keeping thousands of damaged, misfolded, or otherwise obsolete proteins from piling up inside your cells like so much interplanetary space junk. … [Read more...] about These Protein Picker-Uppers Keep Your Cells Clean and Healthy