Prehistoric farming communities in Europe constructed water wells out of oak timbers - it seems early farmers were skilled carpenters long before metal was discovered or used for tools.   …

Solar panels are easily susceptible to mechanical problems.  Storms, leaves, you name it - but some of that is because they are rigid.  That rigidity also limits their applications. New…

When is diversity a bad thing?  When it comes to environmental action, according to a new paper from  the University of East Anglia (UEA).  Scandinavian countries, low in ethnic and…

Human hands and their remarkable dexterity have given us everything from the guitar of Segovia to the art of the Dutch masters but, says David Carrier from the University of Utah, they evolved to be…

Outrage about another school shooting does its part to increase vigilance against the odd ones out, the misfits soiling the norm of usual irrationality, the a-socials, the depressed, the autistic,…

Scientists have found that therizinosaurs defied the sterotype of sensory abilities of plant-eating animals. Their  exceptional sensory abilities - smell, hearing and balance - were well…

In many modern discussions about bacteria, or germs, we find that novel descriptions are used that are more self-involved than accurate regarding the role of bacteria and microbes.  Certainly…

Evaporative cooling has been used to cool atoms to extraordinarily low temperatures. The process was used in 1995 to create a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms…

Our eyes are the window to the world, but making sense of the thousands of images that flood us each day is squarely in the purview of the brain - and now researchers say they have created the first…

It's too late to treat Lou Gehrig, but he would probably still be batting .300 and playing every day for the New York Yankees if he had not been struck down by the disease that now bears his name.…

There's no way to legislate evil out of existence and mentally ill homicidal people are sometimes going to commit gruesome crimes. It has no cultural boundaries. The same day a mentally ill American…

Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars bound to each other by their mutual gravity. They are old, relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12-13 billion years,…

Josh Miller likes to call himself a conservation paleobiologist, which makes sense when he explains how he uses bones as up-to-last-season information on contemporary animal populations.  Bones…

One of the small regulatory molecules, named microRNA-125b, is a novel regulator of p53, an important protein that safeguards cells against cancers, Singapore and U.S. scientists report in the March…

Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars most like our Sun, may have five planets.  Tau Ceti is just 11.9 light years away and visible to our eyes in the evening sky. It is the closest single star…

The goal of science is to explain the world according to natural laws - and then sometimes to break those rules. And there is no greater rule than that people age and die.  But we mitigate and…

Celiac disease, defined as a 'chronic small intestinal immune-mediated enteropathy precipitated by exposure to dietary gluten in genetically predisposed individuals', affects about one percent of the…

When does a business that has carefully positioned itself as more natural and wholesome and healthy and not at all like Big Ag suddenly look a lot like Big Ag? When the FDA tells them they can only…

Recently, more than 100 cosmologists, particle physicists and observational astrophysicists at least agreed that dark matter is important. Of course, you are not getting invited to a colloquium on…

In Europe, Spain and Germany, whose populations bought into the 'subsidize legacy technology now and it will be cheaper later' myth, there is a backlash against solar power. Politicians are seeing…