Right, but the object of the paper is to then advance what is known in that very area, in which I think it is highly successful. Varieties of thioredoxins are present in every free-living organism on earth. One of their many functions is to donate electrons to an enzyme called ribonucleotide reductase which converts ribonucleotides into deoxyribonucleotides, so in a roundabout way, working thioredoxin proteins are necessary to make DNA. Between its ubiquity and general structural similarities in modern organisms, there is reason to think that the general structure of thioredoxins was settled long ago in the history of life, before archaea and eukaryotes split off from bacteria. As other posters have noted, the timeframe of this event is generally held to have been ~3.5-3.8 billion years ago.

To be fair to the journalists, it wasn't them doing the rounding: Conservation of Protein Structure over Four Billion Years.

From the experiments that were done to find this new layer, it seems that it is very difficult to separate from the adjoining layer (Descemet's membrane). Getting Dua's layer to separate from Descemet's membrane was a serendipitous result of simulating eye surgery (a lamellar keratoplasty, which is a partial corneal graft) involving the "big bubble technique," which uses an injection of air to separate Descemet's membrane from the corneal stroma. It turned out that it was sometimes possible to create this air bubble in specimens where Descemet's membrane had been removed, meaning there had to be another layer for air to get into. Otherwise, it wouldn't be easily detected as a separate layer.

Here's what the "big bubble technique" looks like. It's pictures of eye surgery, so don't say you weren't properly warned.

Welcome to Wine Cue!

INPUT: Chateau Petrus, 1998 vintage, Pomerol primarily of Merlot grapes, estimated retail 3500USD

RECOMMENDATION: Charles Shaw, 2010 vintage, Merlot, estimated retail 2USD

That seems likely- data from other instruments on Cassini has suggested that aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzene and anthracene form high in Titan's atmosphere. The altitude (~1000km) is consistent with the location of the glow, and the emission line fits- a mix of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons has long been thought to be the source of a 3.3 micron emission line seen in interstellar dust.

OK, I did the research, by which I mean I used Google to find out what research had already been done. Honestly, these guys just about took care of it back in 2006. The answer appears to be a qualified "yes," in that many of the basic features of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis translate to MS, but MS is known to have more involvement from some pathways and less from others. In particular, the method of inducing EAE infection in mice led to a focus on the role of CD4+ cells (which include the TH17 cells) for years, until it was discovered that CD8+ cells also play a major role in MS. It turns out that treatments developed using EAE have had mixed results in treating human MS. For instance, there was a lot of hope in the late 1990s for a tumor necrosis factor blocker called lenercept, which was effective against EAE, but actually made MS worse. On the other hand, secukinumab, an antibody against interleukin-17 itself, has shown positive results against MS in a early proof-of-concept trial.

As the Gold, et al. paper concludes, "Autoimmune encephalomyelitis is, thus, an excellent tool for studying basic mechanisms of brain inflammation and immune-mediated CNS tissue injury, and for obtaining proof of principle, whether a certain therapeutic strategy has the potential to block these pathways. Whether they are relevant for multiple sclerosis patients in general and, if yes, for what subpopulation of patients has to be determined in respective clinical studies."

Virtually all of what is sold as Himalayan pink salt comes from a gigantic salt mine in Pakistan. It does come from out of a mountain, in the descripitively named Salt Range, but it's as far away from the actual Himalayas as Kansas is from the Rockies. It's solely a marketing term. It's also just rock salt, and that pink color is just from iron oxide.

An issue I've seen with the use of mouse models in several places is that studies in mice (including this one) are based around a disease called EAE which can be readily induced in mice and which has many features similar to human multiple sclerosis. It's of course convenient experimentally to be able to induce what is normally a rare and unpredictable autoimmunity, but how well does that compare to human patients? Induction of EAE involves injecting mice with brain matter and pertussis toxin, in order to generate an inflammatory response to the mouse's own myelin. I wonder if the pathways for that induced imflammation are the same as for genuine autoimmunity, and whether the pathways of EAE really translate to multiple sclerosis, the causes of which are still rather mysterious.

Bisphenol-A is not a lubricant, it's a compound present in the plastic liners used in aluminum cans.

The analogy between Battletoads and Groupon goes even deeper. Just as Battletoads had an infamous bug that prevented Player 2 from completing Level 11 (they would just sit motionless until they lost all their lives), Groupon looks like in the near future it will be stuck in Chapter 11.

Looking again at the BBC article, they do mention physical attacks (and the page picture seems to be depicting one), so I went looking for the researcher's' own page, and it turns out there are some videos of sparrows attacking a taxidermied sparrow. From the looks of it, they may have used the "robosparrow" with the motorized wing in a cage, since it was fragile and they only had one. This video from 2011 of a live sparrow attacking a stationary taxidermied sparrow seems to suggest that there's no way the Robosparrow makes it two months in the wild if this is the kind of treatment sparrows dish out to rivals. Go for the eyes, Boo!

There's video of the sparrow in the supplementary information tab on the abstract page in Quicktime format. The file 265_2013_1478_MOESM2_ESM.m4v is the one with footage of the reanimated sparrow. I'll warn you that it isn't exactly thrilling. No lurid sparrow on cybersparrow violence.

Of note is that they actually operated the mechanical bird inside a cage. I think the quote "Eventually the head fell off and the wing stopped moving" from the BBC article meant precisely that: the robobird fell apart from exposure to the elements and repeated trials.

The /. submitter appears to have wrongly inferred that this damage was from other sparrows tearing it apart, when in fact their aggressive behavior was "got close and waved menacingly."

They established the origin of the hydrocarbons by measuring the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio. Organic compounds made by living things on the surface of the earth will have a small amount of carbon-14 incorporated. Just about all the carbon-14 that had been present in the oil will have decayed with no opportunity for replacement, Their results for their oil-soaked sand show ratios of a few tenths of a percent of the atmospheric value, making it it likely that the vast majority of the hydrocarbons present were from sources which had been dead for eons.

Also, they have profiles of the same oil taken at the source well, surface slicks, and contaminated sand. While the oil degrades with environmental exposure, there is clear similarity among the compositions of the samples. The supporting information gives a lot of details on the experimental methods.

It's actually well known that muons do not orbit at the same distance at electrons (orbit in the quantum atomic orbital sense, of course, but since we're talking about hydrogen-like atoms, they can be described with the Bohr model). The calculations of energy levels do include the rest mass of the electron or muon as appropriate. The very reason to use muons in an experiment like this is their greater mass amplifies certain quantum electrodynamic interactions, allowing scientists to take experimental measurements of these interactions and plug them into QED calculations to determine basic physical properties (like the sizes of particles).

In this case, they used a phenomenon known as the Lamb shift. Essentially, two energy levels that should be identical have a slight difference due to a self-interaction effect. This difference can be measured by spectroscopy.

As they are both the same sort of particle (leptons), electrons and muons should behave identically in this experiment except for the 207 times greater rest mass of the muon, which is accounted for in the calculations. What this result suggests is either the Lamb shift of the electron and of the muon work the same and the experimental setup measures them differently somehow, or that they work differently and there is some sort of new interaction not being accounted for.