A team of psychologists found no sex difference in the number of words people speak per day. After tallying up and then extrapolating the number of words spoken by their subjects, James Pennebaker and his colleagues found that men and women both speak about 16,000 words a day.
Nicholas Putnam, Daniel Rokhsar, and their colleagues report a draft genome sequence of the Cnidarian starlet sea anemone. The anemone genome, they found, looks like a vertebrate's genome – it contains exons and introns. In comparing the anemone genome to fruit flies, nematodes, and people, the researchers discovered that the anemone genome has blocks of DNA that contain the same sets of genes as the human genome, points out the related news story.
Eske Willerslev and a team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from ice cores of southern Greenland. Using PCR they amplified chloroplast DNA to reveal that Greenland once had a northern boreal forest with alder, pine, and yew trees. The news section also contains a profile of Eske Willerslev.
Also check out Science's continued focus on science education.