Sunflowers painted by renowned artist Vincent Van Gogh possessed mutant genes, scientists report, responsible for rows of "double flowers" seen in his most famous painting.

In the journal PLoS Genetics, a University of Georgia team headed by plant biologist John Burke, crossed regular sunflowers with the double-flowered mutants painted by the artist, in a bid to examine their genetics, zeroing in on a gene called "HaCYC2c" as a player in the double flowers.

"Mis-expression of this gene causes a double-flowered phenotype, similar to those captured in Vincent van Gogh's famous nineteenth-century paintings, whereas loss of gene function causes radialization of the normally bilaterally symmetric ray florets," says the study.

Radialization refers to the floral leaves spreading flatly outward like the spokes on a wheel.

Given that all four of the "double flower" types of sunflower investigated in the study carry the same mutant form of the gene, the study researchers say, "it seems likely that this mutation arose just once, and has been incorporated into multiple cultivars because it produces a desirable floral morphology."

So much for natural selection, in other word-- flower fanciers besides Van Gogh have long taken a shine to double flowers, the study suggests.

Who can blame them?

A 3.4 million-year-old pre-human foot fossil has puzzled paleontologists with its mixture of walking and tree-climbing toe bones.

USA TODAY:  Read the story

The good folks at the journal Nature, who published the study reporting the Ethiopian foot finding (in a study led by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural Art), have released some images and a video about the mystery fossil.

The species of the fossil foot's owner is unknown, at present, says the discovery team.

Who says Twitter is completely and utterly useless? Marine scientist have turned two robot subs to tweeting their discoveries home.

Meet the University of South Florida's Tavros (The AutonomousVehicle and Remotely-Operated Sensing) subs, @Tavros01 and @Tavros02, solar-powered explorers of the Gulf Of Mexico. The robot subs will swim underwater on their own, tweeting their location and water-quality sample results on Twitter, the 140-character mini-blogging social network beloved by the chattering classes. (On accounts like, say, @dvergano, which has started following, @Tavros02, a tweeting-machine as of March 22.)

"We were interested in getting machines taking in data and – like humans have processed that data in the past – Tweeting it back to us intelligently," says USF system engineer David Fries, in a university statement. Right now, the sub's tweets are a little on the dry side. But the marine researchers next hope to convert the subs' tweets into plain-language statements about fishing or beach conditions to the public.

As the USA simmers through its hottest March on record — with more than 6,000 record high temperatures already set this month — a new study released Sunday shows that average global temperatures could climb 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.

The study findings are based on the results of 10,000 computer model simulations of future weather overseen by researchers at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

"These are the first results to suggest that the higher warming scenario could be plausible," says study lead author Dan Rowlands of Oxford.

It is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

Most scientists say that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are causing the planet to warm to levels that cannot be explained by natural variability.

The study was published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience and backs up similar predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

According to Rowlands, the climate model was the most complex used to date, and addresses some of the uncertainties that previous forecasts, using simpler models, may have overlooked.

"It's only by running such a large number of simulations — with model versions deliberately chosen to display a range of behavior — that you can get a handle on the uncertainty present in a complex system such as our climate," says Rowlands.

The climate models used in the study accurately reproduced actual, observed temperature changes over the last 50 years: Assuming that models that simulate past warming realistically are the best candidates for future warming predictions, the authors conclude in the study that a warming of from 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050, compared with the 1960-90 average, is in the "likely range" of climate warming.

The earth's average temperature during the decade of 2000-2010 was almost a full degree higher than the average from 1960-90, Rowlands says.

The project ran almost 10,000 climate simulations on volunteers' home computers, which was made possible because volunteers donated time to run the simulations on their home computers through climateprediction.net, as part of the BBC Climate Change Experiment.

"Perhaps the most ambitious effort to date, this work illustrates how the citizen science movement is making an important contribution to this field," says paper co-author Ben Booth, a senior climate scientist with the U.K. Met Office's Hadley Centre.

A grapefruit-sized hailstone that hit Oahu, Hawaii, on March 9 has been confirmed as the largest hailstone on record in Hawaii.

"The final measurement of the hailstone was 4 1/4 inches long, 2 1/4 inches tall, and 2 inches wide," said Michael Cantin, a National Weather Service meteorologist who confirmed the new state record. "According to hail report records for Hawaii kept back to 1950, the previous state record hailstone was 1 inch in diameter."

The record-setting hailstone was dropped by a supercell thunderstorm on the windward side of Oahu and produced large hail in Kaneohe and Kailua. Supercells are the largest, strongest and longest-lasting thunderstorms. Numerous reports of hail with diameters of 2 to 3 inches and greater were reported.

Only eight times since records began has hail of the size of a penny (diameter of 3/4 inch) or a quarter (one inch) been reported in Hawaii, and there is no record of hail larger than one inch in diameter. This is because ingredients to form hail larger than an inch are extremely rare.

Supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes are also both quite rare in Hawaii. The same hail-producing supercell produced a confirmed EF-0 tornado on March 9, with winds of 60-70 mph in Lanikai and Enchanted Lakes on Oahu.

A hailstone that hit Vivian, S.D., on July 23, 2010, holds the U.S record for having the largest diameter (8 inches) and for weighing the most (1.9 pounds). A hailstone in Aurora, Neb., on June 22, 2003, set the nation's record for the largest circumference (18.75 inches).

Hey folks, laser experts have unveiled a prototype camera that can see around corners.

USA TODAY:  Read the story

Here's an explanatory video:

And for an update, we have some reactions to the news by email from outside experts, starting with Ori Katz of the Ultrafast optics group at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science:

"Indeed, the MIT team demonstrates that they can reconstruct the 3D shape of simple objects using the light bounced from diffuse walls. They achieve it by measuring the time-of-arrival (TOA) of the light reflections, using ultrashort laser pulses.

Detecting the location of a single point-like object using TOA measurements is a straight-forward task that is being implemented in many fields, including the GPS in our smartphone (TOA from >4 satellites), and 'echo-location' by dolphins, bats, and even human ears. The novel result of this work is that the team was able to reconstruct the shape of moderately complex objects (rather than a single 'point-like' object), using a fairly simple reconstruction algorithm. The problem with complex objects is that they generate many reflections, which make it generally impossible to determine which reflections came from which part of the object.

What the MIT team showed is that if the 'hidden' object shape is not too complicated, the TOA information gathered from many different illuminating pulses is enough to retrieve the object's shape by computationally 'back-propagating' the light from the wall back to the object location, intersecting the different reflected rays of light. Their results can be extremely interesting if they can be extended to even more complicated 'real-life' objects/scenarios. Another point for further work is the reduction of the acquisition time."

Very recently, work by Katz's group has demonstrated a similar timing-based reconstruction of light reflections, one that treats light as waves, rather than as point-like pulses like the MIT group.

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Albert Einstein, 20th century scientific icon, was no slouch at letter-writing either, it turns out.

Some 80,000 Einstein-related letters and document have gone online in a catalog, released by Hebrew University from its Einstein Archive. Some 2,000 digitized documents will be displayed online as part of the effort, related to the early life of the noted physics genius up until 1921, according to the university.

Hebrew University  Albert Einstein Archives

Einstein was a year away from his Nobel Prize by 1921, already catapulted to fame by 1919 measurements revealing the accuracy of his theory of gravitation, completed in the middle of World War I. His theory of special relativity, which set light as the ultimate speed limit on massive objects, and famous e=mc^2, paper, had been published in 1905, setting him on the path to fame.

Einstein's letter have been sifted and pored over by biographers for decades, of course. The online archive effort aims to make the legendary scientist and thinker, a one-time pacifist who opposed the Nazi regime and who played an instrumental role in the early moments of the atomic bomb, accessible to the public.

Jupiter's explosive moon, Io, has arrived, with the unveiling of a geologic map of the lava-spewing Jovian satellite.

Discovered by Galileo, Io is the innermost moon of Jupiter. Wracked by the jumbo planet's gravity, the moon sees dramatic volcanic eruptions, some more than 190 miles high. Io measures about 2,260 miles across, a bit larger than Earth's moon.

USGS:  Io map

U.S. Geological Survey scientists led by David Williams unveiled the map this month, merging Hubble space telescope images and NASA spacecraft flybys that include the 2007 visit by the New Horizons missions sprinting for Pluto. The report contains a great deal of geologic information on the tortured moon, one of the most exotic settings in the solar system.

A charming review of an "Olive Garden" restaurant opening in Grand Forks, North Dakota has attracted a lot of attention, some good, some bad.

So, just to be scientific about things, we decided to ask an expert what it all means.

Marilyn Hagerty, a restaurant reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald, reviewed a new Olive Garden in her town, and the straight-ahead review went viral online, and gained her son, a Wall Street Journal reporter, a front-page byline writing about the brouhaha. (Talk about "When You're Here, You're Family," the chain's motto.)

A lot of folks made fun of her review (Last Word on Nothing's Cassandra Willyard sympathetically called it "unintentionally funny in its earnestness", noting the ridiculousness of reviewing the chain restaurant's offerings), and a lot of folks thought it was great. She ended up in New York, on a whirlwind dining review tour, which seems fair enough.

Despite this case seeming to be merely an almost perfect example of the inanity of the Internet Era, Science Fair forged ahead and asked an actual social scientist who has published on the Olive Garden and U.S. culture to comment. The University of New Hampshire's Michael Mario Albrecht, author of "'When You're Here, You're Family': Culinary Tourism and the Olive Garden Restaurant," published last year in the journal Tourism Studies, weighed in by email:

I think that the diverse reactions that people have to the Olive Garden speak to a great deal of larger cultural/political tensions that characterize the country right now. The earnestness of the older woman's review identifies her as occupying a particular position within the cultural landscape. People who are unapologetic about chain restaurants and urban sprawl tend to be more conservative leaning. Those who would mock an old woman for her earnest enjoyment of the chain identify themselves as a particular class of what David Brooks has called Bourgeois Bohemians. The "foodie" trend stems from a desire to differentiate one's tastes from others through consumption.

Regardless, Albrecht's 2011 study pointed out that the Italian dining seen as authentic by Olive Garden critics is itself an artifice, spawned after World War II by savvy restaurateurs catering to tourists returning to Italy.

Rather than looking down on phony restaurants, Albrecht suggests that diners adapt a "post-tourist" perspective and simply accept each theme restaurant on its own terms, concluding that, "the Olive Garden is a complicated assemblage of Italian and American, banal and exotic, surface and depth. Rather than simply reveling in its artifice, the post-tourist should look to adopt the tourist sensibility that makes the everyday strange, and to struggle with the complexities that comprise any place, regardless of its ostensible banality."

So there you have it. Make sure you ask for extra bread sticks.

The Man in the Moon looks pretty peaceful up there. But it wasn't always that way, a NASA reconstruction of the moon's past shows.

Craters and cooled lava plains litter the moon's surface today. And based on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) survey of the moon, we now have a pretty good idea of the hard knocks that Luna has taken.

NASA:  LRO Website

LRO scientists recently also released a view of the far side of the moon recently as well, worth a gander too. In case you ever wondered what was on the other side of the moon.

"Bouncing" planets may swap double stars, orbiting one for awhile and then heading for another, astronomers suggest.

Astronomers have detected planets inside nearby multiple star systems in the last decade, where the best-known one is likely the September discovery of a "Tatooine" planet by NASA's Kepler mission, discovered orbiting two stars at once. About half of the stars within 80 light years of Earth (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles) are actually in multiple star systems, typically with stars separated by more than 930 million miles, so perhaps these discoveries are not such a big surprise.

But how surprising would it be to find that these double stars swap planets, passing them back and forth in an astronomical juggling act? In the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal, University of Cambridge astronomers Nickolas Moeckel and Dimitri Veras figure the odds.

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Male scientists still receive an outsized number of research awards compared to women, a study finds.

Women are nominated for research prizes just as frequently as men, however unconscious bias and men running prize panels seems to be swaying award outcomes, suggests the study in the current Social Studies of Science journal.

Varying widely by discipline, women receive about 40% of all doctorates in science (around 70% of psychology degrees but less in other fields) and engineering (about 10%), and have long suffered from lower odds of becoming full professors or attaining other markers of prestige in those fields.

"A large body of social science research finds that work done by women is perceived as less important or valuable that that done by men," begins the study led by sociologist Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In their research, the study authors looked at award patterns from 13 scientific and medical societies from 1991 (206 awards) to 2010 (296 awards).

At first glance, things looked better for women, who won 78% more awards in 2010 compared to two decades earlier. "Closer analysis shows that women continued to win far fewer of the more prestigious scholarly awards than the other types of awards, however – averaging just 10 percent. By comparison, women won 32.2 percent of service awards and 37.1 percent of teaching awards between 2001 and 2010," says the study.

How come? The study authors found seven math, science and medical societies willing to open their award process for examination.

Looking at nominations and composition of award committees, the study team found that women were statistically less likely win awards from panels headed by men, winning 5% of those awards, against 23% of prizes from panels headed by women. And men were much more likely to head prestigious research award panels. The study describes a "Matilda" effect, the opposite of the so-called "Matthew effect" where stars in fields attract ever-more resources beyond their due ('the rich get richer'), afflicting women scientists ('the poor get poorer'):

"Our findings suggest that the 'Matilda Effect' persists – men receive an outsized share of scholarly awards and prizes compared with their representation in the nomination pool, despite efforts to increase nominations of women. That is, though some awards have few female nominees, the evidence suggests that women are not winning not because they are not being nominated. Rather, although overt gender discrimination generally continues to decline in American society, our research is consistent with other studies that document the culturally held belief that women's scholarly efforts are less important than those of men. A consequence of this belief is that women continue to be disadvantaged with respect to the receipt of scientific awards and prizes, particularly for research."

What to do about it? First award societies should let prize panels know about this tilt toward service awards for women and away from research awards. Putting more women on prize panels would also help.

"When male committee members seek nominees, they are thus more likely to contact other men, rather than women. Consequently, ensuring that women are on prize committees, especially as chairs, is particularly important," they conclude.

The Sun isn't done with us yet, with a solar hotspot blasting out two more flares over the weekend, producing moderate solar storm activity.

NASA reports the two M-class flares came from the same solar region that sent a large solar storm our way last week.

The latest solar outbursts mean that, "(t)he geomagnetic field is expected to be at active to major storm levels," the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center says, here on Earth. Geomagnetic storms should quiet by Thursday, limiting risks of radio blackouts.

We should expect more. Solar activity is increasing on the sun, heading toward its "solar maximum" peak of activity on the 11-year solar cycle of waxing and waning outbursts.

Americans' skepticism about global warming has increased over the past few years, and a recent study says that the dismal economy is the prime reason.

"We suggest that the decline in belief about climate change is most likely driven by the economic insecurity caused by the Great Recession," political scientists Lyle Scruggs and Salil Benegal of the University of Connecticut write in the study.

The economy is even more of a factor than partisan politics, supposed biased media coverage, or changeable weather, they say.

The study appeared in February in the journal Global Environmental Change, and relied on several U.S. and international public opinion surveys taken over the past three decades.

Scruggs, the lead author, says the public's belief in climate change sagged as the economy dipped and unemployment climbed in the late 2000s, dropping from a belief rate of 60-65 percent in 2008 to about 50 percent in 2010.

Additionally, when the unemployment rate was a low 4.5 percent, nearly 60 percent of those surveyed said climate change had already started. But when the jobless rate reached 10 percent, that number dropped to about 50 percent.

Scruggs says the trend also held true among survey respondents across political parties and also in Europe, despite that continent's stronger overall pro-climate ethos.

"We would suggest that it is misreading public opinion to dismiss the impact of the current economic crisis and to blame the problem mainly on disinformation or the weather," the authors write. "Given what we know about recent and historic patterns, it seems probable that climate change opinion will rebound as the economy, and more specifically the job situation, improves."

Are you as smart as an 11-year-old? How about smart enough to explain how fire works to one of them?

Science documentary star Alan Alda (he also played a doctor on a TV show, too, you may recall), is asking scientists to take 'The Flame Challenge' today in the journal, Science:

"I'd like to try a playful experiment. Would you be willing to have a go at writing your own explanation of what a flame is—one that an 11-year-old would find intelligible, maybe even fun?"

The writer and actor helped start the Center for Communicating Science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, after working on PBS science documentaries. In an interview with USA TODAY, Alda says he is worried about a widening disconnect between scientific thinking and public understanding of many major issues.

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