The lure of gold has caused many to drop everything and rush off in search of the "mother lode." But where exactly do these precious gold deposits come from? An explanation for the origin of gold deposits has long eluded and perplexed prospectors and even geoscientists. But one new study may have unlocked just the right clues.

As they say in the real estate business, location is everything. It looks like the same working principle applies to genes and their control sequences in the genome during embryo development. And not just the gene’s simple location in a linear sense, but its three-dimensional spatial location.

One of the key arguments of human evolution has now suffered the same fate as many other debunked icons of the errant paradigm of "junk DNA." In this case, it is new research related to the beta-globin pseudogene—which now shows it to be functional and important to hemoglobin gene regulation.

The word "fail" usually implies that something went wrong. To fail a school exam decreases the chances of passing the course, and failing a physical exam portends poor health. But when scientists studied yeast and bacteria that "fail to optimize" the production of certain proteins, they discovered that's actually a very good thing.

According to evolution, eons ago mere ingredients like mud, minerals, and methane somehow made themselves into some single-celled bacteria…some of those bacteria became worms, and some of the worms eventually became people. A newly described out-of-place fossil confronts this origins myth.