Salmonella bacteria became a health threat relatively recently, when chicken eggs were infected by the migration of the bacteria from chickens’ digestive organs to their reproductive organs. Geneticists are working to characterize differences between the harmful and innocuous strains of Salmonella.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been on a mission to gather information on the structure and composition of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. Conventional cosmology holds that the planets of the solar system are billions of years old. But the more that scientists learn about Saturn’s systems, the more they uncover evidence of a young planet.

On the heels of President Barack Obama’s March 9 order to use public monies to support embryonic stem cell research,¹ another source of stem cells has become available—blood. Blood would be an ideal supplier for stem cells because it is a renewable tissue and harvesting blood components does not end life.

The vast majority of modern medicines are toxic at high concentrations or when misused, but they can promote health at low concentrations and when they are carefully applied. Thus, the very same compound can confer both beneficial and deleterious effects, depending on how it is utilized. Illustrating this, a new medicine to slow brain cancer is on its way—and it comes from scorpions!

Flu is in the news, with some people fearing a possible pandemic from the latest strain. The most recent threat, initially labeled “swine flu,” comes from an H1N1 influenza virus, the same “subtype” responsible for the horrendous 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak. What makes this virus new is that it traded parts with other flu viruses and mutated.