When the weather cools, ectothermic (cold-blooded) animals slow down, which should be good news for their potential prey. But the colorful chameleon has found a way to keep feeding at top speeds even in lower temps: an elastic-tissue tongue, which unlike regular muscles, can uncoil nearly as fast in lower temperatures as it can in warmer ones.

The chameleons' weapon is fast, rolling out as far as twice the lizard's body length as quickly as 0.07 seconds (some species' tongues accelerate from zero to six meters per second in just 20 milliseconds, according to a 2004 study). Triggered by a muscle, the collagen tissue tongue then uncoils based on momentum, and this direct flow of kinetic energy travels more rapidly than it could through muscle, noted researchers Christopher Anderson and Stephen Deban, both of the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

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Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a rapidly expanding inventory of ailments—including heart disease, cancer and the common cold. A new discovery demonstrates how the vitamin plays a major role in keeping the body healthy in the first place, by allowing the immune system's T cells to start doing their jobs. 

In order for T cells to become active members of the body's immune system, they must transition from so-called "naive" T cells into either killer cells or helper cells (which are charged with "remembering" specific invaders). And, if ample vitamin D is not around, the T cells do not make that crucial transition, a group of researchers led by Carsten Geisler, head of the Department of International Health, Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen, found. They draw this conclusion based on their experiments with isolated naïve human T cells.

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The fuel cell has a long history. Various types of fuel cells have been part of the NASA space program, and the basic science of how fuel cells work—an energy carrier comes in, creates a flow of charge in the anode, which migrates to the cathode creating a current, and separated by some form of electrolyte—has been known for more than a century. Yet, Bloom Energy believes the time is finally right for one of the more promising fuel-cell technologies—solid-oxide fuel cells, so-called because the electrolyte is a solid rather than the more common liquids—to produce electricity on a grander scale.

The company, featured in a 60 Minutes segment on February 18, has developed a version of the solid-oxide fuel cell that relies on natural gas to generate 100 kilowatts of electricity, all for $800,000. Even at that price, the company has sold 30 of them to customers such as eBay, Google and Wal-Mart, primarily so that those companies can ensure dependable electricity even in a situation where the supply from the traditional grid is interrupted. The expensive technology would replace the more typical diesel generator often employed by hospitals and the like, which can cost as little as $25,000 not counting costs associated with the petroleum-derived fuel.

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The entire budget of the U.S. Department of Energy branch that covers today's energy mix—from cleaning up energy generation's environmental aftermath to energy efficiency programs and renewable energy development—is $10 billion. That's enough to "either build one supercollider on the basic end or one nuclear power plant on the applied end," said Kristina Johnson, the undersecretary in charge of the branch, at the ARPA-E conference on March 3. In other words, nuclear power ain't cheap.

Although estimates vary, there is no doubt that the up-front cost of conventional nuclear power plants—so-called light water reactors that use lightly enriched uranium for fuel—is high compared with any alternatives. Hence, the nuclear loan guarantees from the federal government: no single electric utility can afford to, in effect, bet the company on one nuclear power plant.

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Launching a successful start-up these days takes more than a good idea—in the digital age a revolutionary quantitative approach can be just as effective as a solid business plan, if not more so. Take Google—it was hardly the first search engine to come along (remember Lycos? AltaVista?). But the company's PageRank algorithm vaulted it over superficially similar competitors in just a few short years.

The symbiosis between upstart companies and math-minded individuals is a win–win, as Columbia University applied mathematician Chris Wiggins sees it: The start-ups can optimize whatever service they set out to provide, and the mathematicians can make a living without turning to the dark side—the world of finance. Wiggins waxed evangelical on the topic Wednesday at a Columbia meet-up for members of the math community and New York City start-ups, the latter group brought to the table with help from Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post. It's all part of Wiggins's plan, as he put it in describing a new internship program, to "keep the kids off the street ... off Wall Street."

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It looked like a dinosaur, walked like a dinosaur, and ate like, well, some dinosaurs, but a newly discovered species of archosaur, which lived 240 million years ago, was not a dinosaur.

It was an ancient silesaur, which emerged 10 million years before true dinos did. And its unearthing in Tanzania—the first early dinosaur-like animal to be found in Africa—adds new detail to the sketchy understanding of the primitive Ornithodira lineage that would eventually produce T. rex and turkeys alike.

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One drinking-water bottle could provide enough energy for an entire household in the developing world if Dan Nocera has his way. A chemist from M.I.T. and founder of the company Sun Catalytix, Nocera has developed a cobalt-based catalyst that allows him to store energy the same way plants do: by splitting water.

"Almost all the solar energy is stored in water splitting," Nocera told the inaugural ARPA-E conference on March 2. Solar Catalytix is among five companies awarded government funding to develop "direct solar fuels," dubbed "electrofuels" by ARPA-E, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for transformational energy technologies. "We emulated photosynthesis for large-scale storage of solar energy."

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NEW YORK—As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy, another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases—threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth's climate.

At a symposium held yesterday at the New York Academy of Sciences, researchers from public health, climate, medicine and other fields gathered to discuss some of the big questions that remain in uniting these evolving fields. "The relation between climate change and infectious diseases is highly controversial to say the least," Richard Ostfeld, of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said here.

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