This amazing time-lapse video shows footage taken from the International Space Station as it orbits Earth at night.

Released on YouTube last week, the video has received over 345 000 views. It tracks the shuttle’s journey from the Pacific Ocean and continues over the Americas before reaching Antarctica. Take a look:

Video via yesterday2221

According to a recent article in The New York Times, an American couple that conceived their son via sperm donor seven years ago has turned to a web-based registry to seek out information regarding their child’s half-siblings, and found 150 of them.

“Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population,” writes Jacqueline Mroz of The New York Times.

Read the full story here.

Bisexual men won’t likely be surprised — or feel particularly validated — to learn that a new scientific study confirms that their sexual attraction to both men and women is real.

For the new study, researchers at Northwestern University recruited a group of 100 Chicago-area men, identifying as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual in roughly equal numbers.

Read the rest of this article here (via Time Magazine)

Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins are critical for our modern immune systems, researchers report in Science journal.

Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day, they conclude.

Read the full story here (via BBC News)

It would be easy to laugh at Chris Nsamba, founder of the African Space Research Programme.

For a start, his research centre is based in his back garden where there’s not much evidence of the type of sophisticated tools and machinery I’d imagine you need for this kind of work. When I was there, most of the engineers were equipped with just sandpaper and paint brushes.

Read the rest of this article here (via BBC News)

A small, 160-million-year-old Chinese fossil has something big to say about the emergence of mammals on Earth.

The shrew-like creature is the earliest known example of an animal that used a placenta to provide nourishment to their unborn young. The discovery pushes back the date the two groups took up their separate lines, according to Nature magazine.

Read the rest of this article here (via BBC News)

The discovery of lager yeast’s parentage has implications for brewers, and Diego Libkind, the primary researcher on a new study, is already tapping into some of these ideas.

A new discovery has unlocked the secret story of lager beer’s South American origins, and is letting scientists piece together the genetic history of the domesticated microbe that keeps lager cool.  This final piece of the yeast’s genetic family tree could one day help brewers create custom-made designer brews with carefully selected characteristics.

Read the rest of this article here (via Fast Company)

A new study estimates that Earth has almost 8.8 million species, but we’ve only discovered about a quarter of them.

And some of the yet-to-be-seen ones could be in our own backyards, scientists say. So far, only 1.9 million species have been found. Recent discoveries have been small and weird: a psychedelic frogfish, a lizard the size of a dime and even a blind hairy mini-lobster at the bottom of the ocean.

Read the rest of this article here (via Time Magazine)

The majority of people reading this sentence will, at some point in their lives, undergo a medical treatment that requires general anesthesia. Doctors will inject them with a drug, or have them breathe it in.

For several hours, they will be unconscious. And almost all of them will wake up happy and healthy.

Read the rest of the article here. (via Boing Boing.)

The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

Read the rest of the article here. (via Rolling Stone.)

Last January, a Minnesota man’s heart stopped beating for an amazing 96 minutes.

Emergency room doctors thought he was dead. But first responders who gave CPR on the scene decided not to give up, in part because of technology that allowed them to see their efforts were working.

Read the rest of the article here. (via NPR.)

When former astronaut Story Musgrave addresses an expected huge throng of UFO believers in California next week, he’ll delight the crowd when he tells them he believes we’re not alone in the universe.

But then he’s going to tell members of the Mutual UFO Network — the largest UFO research organization in the world — just what they don’t want to hear: Earth has probably not been visited by extraterrestrials.

Read the rest of the article here. (via Huffington Post.)

A glowing beagle is definitely on the list of things we never expected to see.

But South Korean scientists seem to have made it a reality in hopes of finding cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, according to Reuters.

Read the rest of this article here. (via Huffingtonpost.)

The psychedelic drug in magic mushrooms may have lasting medical and spiritual benefits, according to new research from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The mushroom-derived hallucinogen, called psilocybin, is known to trigger transformative spiritual states, but at high doses it can also result in “bad trips” marked by terror and panic.

Read the rest of this article here. (via Time.)

Last January, a Minnesota man’s heart stopped beating for an amazing 96 minutes.

Emergency room doctors thought he was dead.  But first responders who gave CPR on the scene decided not to give up, in part because of technology that allowed them to see their efforts were working. It’s called capnography, and it measures how much carbon dioxide is being expelled with each breath.

Read the rest of this article here (via NRP)

Bioartist Jalila Essaïdi attempted to create bulletproof human skin by implanting transgenic spider-silk (extracted from a spider-goat, of course) with human skin.

Essaïdi was hoping for skin that could stop a 2.6g projectile at 329 m/s (the performance standard for bulletproof vests, apparently), but didn’t quite make it.

Read the rest of this article here. (via Boing Boing.)

A swell in new cases of narcolepsy in China followed seasonal patterns of flu, including H1N1, according to a recent study led by Dr. Emmanuel Mignot of the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The new cases appear to be associated with flu infection itself, not with flu vaccinations. Researchers believe that people have a genetic predisposition to narcolepsy, which may be triggered by some environmental factor, such as an upper airway infection. Reported the New York Times:

Read the rest of this article here (via Time Magazine)

Asteroid impacts on the Earth may have scattered more life-bearing debris to Mars, Jupiter or beyond our Solar System than previously thought.

Vast computer simulations of debris thrown up from Earth impacts show 100 times more particles end up on Mars than prior studies have shown. Only the hardiest of Earth’s organisms could have survived the trip, however.

Read the rest of this article here (via BBC News)

Latest bid to count and catalogue the living world is billed as the most accurate yet, but only a tiny proportion is known to science.

Humans share the planet with as many as 8.7 million different forms of life, according to what is being billed as the most accurate estimate yet of life on Earth.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Guardian)

An Iranian man has gone on trial, charged with killing one of the country’s nuclear scientists and having links to Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

State media said Majid Jamali Fashi had confessed to the murder of Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a physics professor at Tehran University, on 12 January 2010.

Read the rest of this article here (via BBC News)