New evidence that comets may have seeded life on Earth
A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space has shown that linked pairs of amino acids – essential building blocks…
Can nicotine transmit disease through multiple generations?
Nicotine creates heritable epigenetic marks on the genome, say Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute scientists who contend that a grandparent’s…
Volcanoes keeping a lid on global warming
Climatologists in the U.S. say that dozens of active volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere have been offsetting about…
Conjoined rat brains demonstrate thought transference over the Internet
Duke University researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats for the first time, enabling the rodents to…
Supermassive black hole spins super-fast
Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the…
Stretchy battery can bend and twist
A team of scientists from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois are the first to demonstrate a stretchable lithium-ion…
First discovery of extraterrestrial life will likely be around a white dwarf star, say astrophysicists
Detecting extraterrestrial life from tell-tale atmospheric signatures is much easier to do when the planet under observation is orbiting a…
Nano-rod solar cell generates hydrogen
A new type of solar collector that uses gold nano-rods could convert sunlight into energy without many of the problems…
Tweet this: human language may have evolved from birdsong
Charles Darwin speculated that language might have had its origins in singing and now linguists from MIT are taking that…
New imaging device is flexible, flat, transparent, and disposable
An Austrian research team has developed an entirely new way of capturing images based on a flat, flexible, transparent, and…
Medicos mull possible link between obesity and ADHD
A new University of Illinois study has established a possible link between high-fat diets and childhood cognitive conditions such as…
Russian scientists locate meteorite fragments
Russia’s Ria Novosti news agency has reported that Russian scientists have located fragments from the meteor that broke up dramatically…
Appreciation of musical harmony is nurture, not nature, say Aussie scientists
Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability, say researchers at…
Flushed pharmaceuticals fueling fearless fish
Widely prescribed anxiety-moderating drugs such as Serepax are persisting through wastewater treatment plants after being excreted and modifying fish behaviors,…
Massive depletion of Middle East freshwater reserves
Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing…
Republicans’ brains wired for fight-or-flight
Measuring the brain activity of Republicans and Democrats while they played a game has revealed striking differences in each group’s…
Bio-computer combines DNA memory and cellular logic gates
MIT scientists have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results,…
Gay animals an inconvenient truth for BBC, claims study
A new study in the European Journal of Cultural Studies criticizes wildlife documentaries produced by the BBC for ignoring widespread…
Rare strobe-like binary protostar found
The Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a strobe…
Earth-like planets may be closer than previously thought
A new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope indicates that many red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets,…
Significant bacterial populations found in upper atmosphere
Using a DC-8 aircraft to scoop-up air samples from the troposphere, scientists have identified significant numbers of living microorganisms –…
TV watching a predictor of sperm count
Healthy young men who watch television for more than 20 hours a week have around half the sperm count of…
Oxycontin overdoses at epidemic levels
While heroin overdoses have declined, overdoses from prescription opioids such as oxycodone (marketed as Oxycontin) increased seven-fold in New York…
Mystery of extreme head-rotation in owls explained
Anatomical artists and neurological experts at Johns Hopkins have finally unravelled how night-hunting owls can almost fully rotate their heads…
Modified gut flora could end malnutrition
A new study conducted in sub-Saharan Africa found that bacteria living in the intestine are an underlying cause of childhood…
Simulation reveals evolutionary origins of modularity
Robotics researchers say they now understand why humans, bacteria and other organisms evolved in a modular fashion, a finding that…
Synesthesia traced to childhood toy
Experiencing a color when viewing particular letters or numbers – known as color-graphemesynesthesia – may partly be a learned behavior,…
Multitasking: you’re bad at it
Most people believe they can multitask effectively, but a new University of Utah study indicates that the people who multitask…
Car designs may change to protect obese
An analysis of traffic collision fatalities showing that obese drivers are far more likely to die than drivers of normal…