Embryonic development of Fruitfly, cell by cell

Embryonic development of fruit flies has been tracked in realtime by using multidirectional imaging technique.

While watching it, ask yourself when does the life enter into the clusters of cell...


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Fruitfly development, cell by cell : Nature News & Comment:

"References
Tomer, R., Khairy, K., Amat, F. & Keller, P. Nature Methods http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2062 (2012).
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Krzic, U., Gunthur, S., Saunders, T. E., Streichan, S. J. & Hufnagel, L. Nature Methods http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2064 (2012)."

Drilling the VostoK ice core: search for life in isolated places.

Update: The Russians (may [1, 2]) have reached at the depth of 3768 meters, the surface of the sub-glacial lake. [Sourcehttp://news.discovery.com/earth/they-did-it-curent-status-on-russian-lake-vostok-120206.html]
More: here,
The origin of life is an interesting topic because addressing it affects so many philosophical aspects of present day science. As a computational scientists, we do believe in the Markov Chain Monte Carlo-like trial and error method of evolution[!], whereby the living organism is subjected to several forces of evolution and the chances of evolution depends upon the probability of survival of the evolved beings.

Other views on origin of life are open and are welcome!

The vostok ice core has been compared with other environments such as that of the deep sea of Europa or the ice volcanoes of Enceladus; the moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively. This lake has been isolated for 14 million years. Exploration of such isolated system (without infecting them) could open up possibilities of testing various hypotheses on the origin/possibilities of life on outer/other planets.
A nice article: http://www.cosmonline.co.uk/blog/2012/02/05/vostok-lake-time-forgot 

Lake VostoK src

Quoting BBC:

The Russians have friendly competition from US and British teams. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) are hoping to begin their project to drill into Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica later this year. An American crew is targeting Lake Whillans.

From:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/antarctic-lake-drilling

Great! you are selected for grad school, now what?

This is one of the post I am writing for the graduate students coming aboard.
First, my congratulations for being selected. Pursuing your dream in higher studies is going to be very important. It is important not only because you get into graduate school but also because it will define your career path for rest of your life.
Your question is regarding whether you wanna go the the university that offered you. If you had carefully selected and applied to the universities, you will have no problem in deciding once you get the offer letter But what if two very competent universities are calling you?
I have the following recommendations (and they apply equally to cases when one is preparing to apply for grad school):

• Visit the University website. Especially, the departmental website. 
• Visit Each faculty website, see the trends in the department research. Are the faculty actively involved in research?
• See if the research field particularly interests you.
• See if you can figure out the number of graduate student to faculty ratio. 
• If your support comes from doing the TA duties, see if you can figure out the number of undergraduate student to graduate student ratio.
• How about the weather? Location? Socialization?

These are the basic questions that you need before you start out your venture. They are important as it will guide your next five years (plus/minus 1) and ultimately your academic life.
Once you figure out such basic academic facts, you can then go for planning the (local) life style there. The best case scenario would be if you have any close friend living nearby. If you can contact the department secretary to learn about the housing, it will also make your life much better. Craiglist listing on apartments can also be equally illuminating.