Globally every year, obese people waste billions on food products that 'imply' that they aid weight loss, but are totally ineffective, says a nutritional expert on British Medical Journal (www.bmj…

Take out carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns, says the World Agroforestry Center , and existing technology that could effectively monitor carbon storage in developing country…

No one needs to tell Disney, who brought the likes of Herbie the Love Bug and Lightning McQueen to the big screen, that cars have personalities.   A study co-authored by a Florida State…

Media coverage of clinical trials does not contain the elements readers require to make informed decisions. A comparison of the coverage received by pharmaceutical and herbal remedy trials, reported…

Bone growth is controlled in the gut through serotonin, the same naturally present chemical used by the brain to influence mood, appetite and sleep, according to a new discovery from researchers at…

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed,…

I’ve recently touched on the delicate topic of human nature. Now it's the turn of the even more inflammatory subject of race. The occasion is provided by a short commentary in Science (1),…

My displeasure with media stories continues today with another over-the-top, speculative, and tailor-made-for-quote-mining article from Discovery News. The gist of it is that some people saw a very…

Every type of disease has a specific treatment program. We have drugs to treat symptoms of countless illnesses and maladies, but viral infections continue to elude treatment. While we have vaccines…

Scientists have detected an organic sugar molecule that is directly linked to the origin of life, in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets could exist.  The international team of…

The Secretariat of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has lost valuable ground by ignoring for years the contribution of long-term concurrent relationships to Africa's AIDS…

Research chemists at the University of Warwick have devised a process which covers small particles of polymer with a layer of silica-based nanoparticles and provides a versatile material that can be…

Sandcastle worms live in intertidal surf, building sturdy tube-shaped homes from bits of sand and shell and their own natural glue. University of Utah bioengineers have made a synthetic version of…

The next time you have to make a difficult moral decision, you might think twice about mulling it over in the bath or shower.   New research in Psychological Science has found that the physical…

A new small satellite about the size of a loaf of bread and called Firefly is designed to help solve the mystery of the most powerful natural particle accelerator in Earth's atmosphere - TGFs, or…

Two of our galaxy's most massive stars, until recently shrouded in mystery, have been viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope, unveiling greater detail than ever before. The image shows a pair of…

A new "barcode chip" developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) promises to revolutionize diagnostic medical testing. In less than 10 minutes, and using just a…

Radiant Floor Heating Warm air rises. A traditional forced-air heating system for the 35-foot-high public spaces in the museum would be wasteful in the extreme. Instead, the Academy is installing a…

In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori described what he called the "uncanny valley" - a point on a graph relating human affinity for a machine to its likeness of humans themselves, where…

Most scientists have a rational basis for experimentation but then there were (and are) others who ran with their own rules.   These are the people I am referring to as 'Mad Scientists' rather…