Plummeting Shellfish Stocks Blamed On Shark Overfishing
The fragile and complex nature of ocean ecosystems is becoming ever more apparent as scientists uncover new relationships between diverse…
West Antarctic Ice Sheet Gets Climatologists Hot And Bothered
A statement just issued by a gaggle of polar ice scientists has warned that unless we come to grips with…
Neuronal Behavior Confounds Expectations
The idea that the electrical signal patterns generated by neurons represent the encoding of different types of cognitive information appears…
Bacterium Fires-Up Plain Air Fuel Cell
British researchers at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society today announced a new kind of “biofuel cell” that…
Limited Resources The Key To Biodiversity?
Somewhat counter-intuitively, experiments conducted by University of Minnesota (UM) researchers have shown that a plentiful supply of water and nutrients…
Biochemical “Noise” Critical For Regulating Biological Processes
Noise, like the static heard on AM radio, is generally thought to be a nuisance in most applications. But within…
Getting Physical With Molecules
The same researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UI) who came up with self-healing plastic have described in…
Manganese Key To Radiation-Proofing Of Organisms
Exploring methods to protect living organisms from chronic or acute doses of radiation, military researchers say they have uncovered how…
Sex Optional For Evolutionary Adaptation
The pond-dwelling microscopic invertebrates known as bdelloid rotifers gave up on sexual reproduction more than 40 million years ago but…
Martian Caves Could Harbor Life
Scientists poring over images from Mars Odyssey believe they have identified what could be the entrances to seven large caves.…
Chill Out To Evolve
Species don’t evolve faster in warmer climes as had been thought; rather, it appears to be cooler, more temperate, regions…
Angry Looks Trigger Reward Circuits
Angry facial expressions are a turn-off for most people, but some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will…
The Skinny On Bad Fat
The role that inflammation plays in diabetes, heart disease and other disorders is a hot topic in medical research these…
Chemists Take Step Toward Artificial Photosynthesis
Plants are extremely efficient at taking carbon dioxide from the air and converting it into biomass using light as an…
Ancient Man Built For Fighting
David Carrier, a biologist from the University of Utah, believes our ancestors maintained short legs for 2 million years because…
Bonobos Put One Over Chimps
Chimpanzees and bonobos are both close cousins to humans, but it’s usually been thought that chimps outdo bonobos in the…
Is Your Carpet Making You Fat?
Flame retardants, known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), are found in consumer products like carpeting, upholstered furniture, computers and household…
Tundra In Retreat
Trees and shrubs in parts of northern Canada are taking over what were once tundra landscapes at a much faster…
Birds Serve Seduction Apprenticeship
Demonstrations of altruism and selfless behavior in the animal kingdom have long puzzled evolutionary biologists. Why do some individuals sacrifice…
3-D Fabrication Goes Open Source
Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of Cornell University have cooked-up a cheap DIY 3-D printer – the Fab@Home – that…
Researchers Map Neuron Connections
Many neuroscientists and AI researchers believe that truly understanding how the brain works will be impossible until we can fathom…
Pluto Probe Cranks Up Pace
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has successfully completed a fly-by of Jupiter, using the massive planet’s gravity to pick up speed…