Every time I see a new scientific paper bearing the name of Dolores Piperno, I sit up and pay very close attention. Piperno is a force to contend with in the world of archaeology, a researcher whose work is so unconventional and yet so rigorous that she has won over a small legion of skeptics and naysayers and helped to found an entirely new field of research.
The battle of Piperno v. the old guard hinged on something seemingly arcane, but critical to the field of archaeology–the identification of plant microfossils. The old guard only accepted evidence from one kind of microfossil: pollen. But Piperno, now the Curator of New World History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, learned to detect and differentiate between an impressive array of other ancient microfossils. Continue reading
May 20: Craig Venter’s team synthesizes a bacterial genome in the lab, sticks it into an empty bacterial cell, and watches it replicate. Venter calls it the “
July 23: NASA scientists take the new Mars rover, Curiosity, for a test drive. When it heads to the Red Planet, in late 2011, Curiosity will hold several instruments equipped to 
A container full of sterile goods left Eastern China one day and ended up, four months later, in the Netherlands. As unpackers were rummaging through packing material, they turned up a tiny mummified mouse. The goods, evidently, were not sterile.
