Science News From Around the Web: Pluto may be the largest dwarf planet

Science news from around the Web:

View full size(NASA via Wikipedia Commons)Pluto (left) may be larger than the dwarf planet Eris (right, with moon Dysnomia to its left). Eris was initially thought to be larger than Pluto, and its discovery in 2006 helped get Pluto knocked off the list of planets.

Eris — whose discovery in 2006 helped Pluto get demoted to a “plutoid” — may turn out to be smaller than the former ninth planet.  Space.com reports astronomers who observed Eris pass across a distant star this weekend have determined Eris is probably smaller than Pluto, but more massive.  When Eris was discovered in 2006, it was thought to be larger than Pluto and was initially christened the 10th planet before the International Astronomical Union moved the two bodies (and others) into its “dwarf planet” classificiation.

ScienceDaily reports a small change in a gene may make people more generous.  People with a variant of the COMT gene, which regulates an enzyme that controls certain carriers in the brain (like dopamine), gave twice as much money in a German study than those who lacked the variant.  The increased altruism appears to be linked to the gene’s effect on dopamine in the brain.

A programmer who got tired of arguing with climate change skeptics has written a program that does it for him.  According to Popular Science, the program, @Al_AGW, scans Twitter every five minutes looking for skeptics’ arguments, then draws a response from a database with hundreds of answers and links to research.

The BBC reports more than 1,000 tigers have been killed for skins, claws and other body parts over the past decade.  The report from Traffic International says enforcement of poaching bans are either “ineffective or an insufficient deterrent.” The number of wild tigers has fallen from 100,000 100 years ago to about 3,500 today.

Researchers have found a way to turn skin cells into blood cells.  Discover reports the researchers used a virus to carry a gene into the skin cells that “reprogrammed” the cells, which were then exposed to proteins that converted them into blood.  The technique could lead to new treatments, although it’s not clear if the body will accept the new blood.

Watch Leaf-cutter ants do what they do best in this video from the National Science Foundation: