Horizontal Gene Transfer Accelerating Evolution
Fossil records indicate that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. It then took about 2.5 billion more…
Researchers Plan Soft-Bodied Robots
Anybody that’s watched a robot move around knows that the potential of hard-bodied robots remains limited by their stiff construction…
Quitting The Hard Way
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) reports in Science that some smokers with damage to a part of the…
Rodent Sperm Cooperate For Success
Competition for successful fertilization is believed to strongly influence the design of sperm and the incredible variation of sperm appearance…
Physicists Propose Test For String Theory
A lot of the controversy surrounding string theory is due to the absence of any meaningful way to test for…
Honey, I Ate The Kids
A new study in American Naturalist is the first to demonstrate that male fish are more likely to eat their…
“Walking” Molecule Does Some Work
Nano-buffs may recall the work done by University of California Riverside’s Ludwig Bartels, in designing a molecule that can move…
Prussian Blue Wrangled Into Data Storage Duty
Prussian Blue, a pigment used in paints, could form the basis of new high efficiency data storage devices. French scientists…
World’s First City Was Destroyed By Fierce Ancient Battle
Archaeologists from the University of Chicago and the Syrian Department of Antiquities have uncovered new details about the tragic end…
Size Of Family Associated With Stomach Cancer Risk
A report in Public Library of Science (PLOS) Medicinesuggests that family size can greatly influence the development of stomach cancer…
Lakes Missing Their Ice Cover
Ice cover on many small- and intermediate-sized lakes in the U.S. Northeast and parts of the Midwest will come later…
Human Diaspora May Have Occurred Later Than Previously Thought
Modern humans spread out of Africa up to 50,000 years later than previously thought, say anthropologists. Three new studies in…
Females Get Into Sexual Selection Game
Peacock tails, the antlers of a bull elk and the lion’s mane have all evolved in male animals thanks to…
Use The Force, Luke
A University College London (UCL) study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not…
Plethora Of Pulsar Poles Perplexes Physicists
Physicists using the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico have uncovered radio interpulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar that feature never-before-seen…
Hubble Captures Birth Of A Planet
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of a “blizzard” of particles in a disk around a young star, shedding…
Fossil Records Show Yo-Yo Effect Of Changing Climate
The mid-Permian transition from ice age to an ice-free planet was marked by dips and rises in carbon dioxide and…
Scientists Slam ExxonMobil’s Global Warming “Disinformation”
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit independent scientific organization formed in 1969, has slammed what it calls ExxonMobil’s…
Menstrual Suppression OK, Say Doctors
Forty years ago, when birth control pills first hit the market, the recommended cycle was three weeks of active contraceptive…
Human Brain Evolution Slows To A Crawl
The human brain underwent explosive growth after we split from our chimp cousins, but the pace of evolutionary change among…
Antiquarian Herbal Book Yields Potential New Drugs
An unusual collaboration between Mayo Clinic researchers and a shamanistic healer from the Pacific nation of Samoa has yielded up…
Nano-Critters Found In Mine Sludge
Jill Banfield, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been poking around in disused mines for more than…
Astronomers Mull Mystery Gamma Ray Burst
Four articles in the journal Nature discuss a mysterious new type of gamma ray burst that doesn’t fit with our…
Obesity Could Bankrupt UK Health System
English doctors say that if nothing is done, the rising prevalence of obesity could bankrupt the country’s health system. The…
Atom-Smashers Get Peek At Top Quark
International physicists have detected for the first time a subatomic particle – the top quark – without the simultaneous production…
Regeneration Hinges On Cell Death
Medical science could be one step closer to understanding how a human limb might be regenerated or a spinal cord…
Petite Nuke Exchange Could Derail Global Climate
Two new studies predict that even a small-scale regional nuclear war could produce as many fatalities as all of World…
Recycled Algorithm Sharpens Astronomical Images
A fast and efficient image enhancement technique that was originally applied to improving monochrome microscope images has proved itself equally…
Viagra Touted As Anti-Cancer Drug
The phenomenal success of the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra (sildenafil) has not been without hiccups. There have been ongoing questions…
Cousin Of Higgs Boson Detected
A particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond, known as the…