(Bi)Weekly Science News Review 14-27 August

Ivan Pavlov has been away from the science desk here at Newsvine through the end of August, and he asked a couple of us other science news enthusiasts to put together some weekly summaries in his absence. I volunteered for the role, but as it turned out, this has been a fairly busy couple of weeks for me. Well, Ivan may never ask me for a favor again, but here is some of the highlights in the world of science for the past two weeks:

Space, Astronomy, & Cosmology

• Pluto hasn't changed at all, but we now no longer call it a planet. While early debate during the International Astronomical Union conference might result in the addition of two new planets, instead Pluto in the end got voted down to dwarf planet status.
• Scientists believe that they have finally observed dark matter. In the crash of a cluster of galaxies, a region presents the strongest evidence for matter which does not react to light.

Biology & Evolution

• A whale fossil discovered in Australia had some surprisingly fierce fangs, given the fact that it's descendants, the baleen whales, are all plankton eaters.
• The Flores "hobbits" may not have been a separate species after all, but rather a precursor to what are today known as pygmies.
• The Latin American ant has the world fastest bite. It's jaws snap so fast, it can send the small insect flying through the air to escape predators.

Math & Physics

• Last week the Field's medal recipients were announced, and the news focused all on Grigory Perelman who published a solution to the Poincare Conjecture (long considered to be one of math's most difficult problems). Perelman, unlike the three other announced recipients, turned down mathematicss' most prestigious award, citing the fact that he had moved on beyond the field of mathematics.

Climate & Geology

• The chemicals used in place of chlorofluorocarbons, which had been banned due to their harmful effects on the ozone layer, may be increasing global warming.

Biology & Medicine

• A synthetic molecule has been discovered that can cause cancer cells to self-destruct by signaling the protein procaspase-3 (which then turns into a cell destroying enzyme), thus causing cancer cells to die off like normal cells.
• A Massachusetts based biotech company announced that they have developed a method of creating embryonic stem cells which does not require the destruction of human embryos.

If there are any important science news items I've left out (my list is much shorter than Ivan's always are), if I've gotten any of the descriptions wrong, or if you've just got some comments to make on these few news items, leave a comment below.