A British Nigerian couple--Ben and Angela Ihegboro--is not aware of any fair-skinned ancestors on either side of their families. Yet they gave birth to a blue-eyed, blond-haired, and fair-skinned baby girl. As the mother herself exclaimed, "What on earth happened here?"

In the tiny world of the cell, segments of DNA called transposons copy and reinsert themselves into the DNA. They eventually produce large repetitive sequences that have for many years been considered useless "junk" or remnants of ancient viral infections. But a new study has uncovered an important function for transposons.

Methodist Dallas Medical Center in 2009 averted an impending outbreak of dangerously infectious bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. Although less prevalent than MRSA, Acinetobacter has acquired a similar resistance to common antibiotics. Would it be accurate to refer to this change in bacteria as "evolution"?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Since there could be neither a chicken nor an egg without each already existing in a fully functional state, they both had to have been put in place at the same time. But there are many interdependent parts in the chicken system, and new research has uncovered one of the tiniest--yet most vital--of them.

After a year of image capturing, many years of planning, and a billion dollars of research spending, the European Space Agency's Planck satellite telescope has produced the first ever image of the entire sky. The Planck "all-sky survey"¹ was taken between August 2009 and June 2010 and captured the microwave radiation of the full sky.