Science News Update: October 5th

In our science news update for this week we take a look at hydrogen bonds, water on Mars, and the Ice Age movies. Plus a new section on updating the textbook and a feature video. Enjoy!

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The Elusive Hydrogen Bond

China’s National Center for Nanoscience & Technology

From the properties of water to the force that holds together DNA, hydrogen bonds play a central role in the discussion of life. Now, for the first time these weak, yet important bonds have been photographed using a process called atomic force microscopy.

Link: http://goo.gl/G1iMFS

Curiosity Detects Water on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected water in the Martian soil. While recent findings have ruled out the presence of methane (and thus probably living organisms), the discovery of water at the Gale Crater once again opens up the possibility that life may of arisen on Mars in the past.
Link: http://goo.gl/qotoFR
NASA site: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/curiosity/index.xhtml

Ice Age: The Effects of Scrat in the Real World

If you have watched any of the ice age movies, you have seen Scrat bury acorns and seeds just before the onset of the glaciers.
Scientists have now brought back to life a 32,000 year old seed buried before the last ice age by a squirrel in Siberia

link:http://goo.gl/7c25Po

Editors’ Choices

New species from Suriname

image: Piotr Naskreki and Discovery News

If you are looking for new species to liven up a presentation, then you need to check out photo gallery from Discovery News:

Link to all of the pictures: http://goo.gl/qASM0m

Updating the Textbooks

As science educators, one of the things we want to do at Ricochet Science is to use this site to continuously update the textbooks that we author. Science is moving at a speed that makes it difficult to keep up with regards to print texts. Therefore, in these updates we have added a new section that brings some of the latest developments in the sciences to the biology textbook.

Flowering Plants May be Older than We Think

A core sample containing fossilized pollen grades has pushed back the earliest dates of flowering plants by almost 100 million years These findings may set the beginnings for the evolution of the flowering plants back into the early Triassic

link: http://goo.gl/L1AJRe

Video of the Week

asapScience always has some great videos. Our favorite this week is “What if You Stopped Sleeping”. A great introduction to a physiology lecture, especially for college freshman who are cramming before an exam.