On Feb. 15, Hubble shot Pluto’s two “new” satellites, discovered last year. For a better glimpse we’ll have to wait-NASA’s New Horizons probe won’t get there until 2015.

-Mike Ghenu

Source: Nature

Too much of a good thing-isn’t

A team of scientists at U of T’s Leslie Dean faculty of pharmacy have finally knocked out the heavyweight champion, the golden boy of nutrition-green tea. Led by Dr. Peter O’Brien, the team found that injecting polyphenols (a chemical found in green tea responsible for the tea’s touted free-radical and cancer-fighting properties) into mice at high concentrations caused liver damage. At low doses, however, similar to the amount people intake from drinking green tea, mice livers were protected from dangerous oxygen radicals. In humans, it is still unknown how the body metabolizes and absorbs the polyphenols in green tea. That green tea is beneficial to one’s health remains widely held, but O’Brien hopes that his study will caution people from rushing into developing a concentrated pill of polyphenols to exploit their antioxidants properties until further research is done.

-Jennifer Bates

Source: Free Radical Biology and Medicine

History repeats

Some of the major evolutionary breakthroughs in the history of life are not unique and can occur several times throughout natural history, says Dr. Geerat Vermeij, a paleoecologist at the University of California at Davis. Vermeij drew up a list of 55 “repeated innovations”-attributes that have arisen more than once, at different points in time. Venom injection, for example, first appeared around 540 million years ago. Vermeij also identified 23 unique innovations, . While wing-propelled flight arose three different times among vertebrate species (225 million years ago was the first time), among arthropods (insects, spiders, and crustaceans) it evolved only once, 340 million years ago. Vermeij attributes part of the perception of uniqueness on information loss in the fossil record, in the form of extinct species that have not yet been discovered. “If we had an Earth-like planet, I think we’d see phenotypes and outcomes that parallel those on Earth,” he said.

-M.G.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, UC-Davis news wire