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…

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…

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…

Cancer cells of all types have one thing in common: they have escaped the built-in controls of cell reproduction, and as a result, tumors grow as the out-of-control cells keep dividing. This out-of…

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic studying Parkinson’s disease have made a breakthrough therapy that could slow progression of the disease or even halt its onset. Previous research has discovered that…

The Milagro collaboration, comprised of scientists from 16 institutions across the United States, has discovered two nearby regions with an unexpected excess of cosmic rays.   This is the second…

The global economic turmoil has started having an impact on the wind energy industry in Europe. Some companies are cutting down forecasts and production for 2009 and the market is showing the first…

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute writing in Nature Structural&Molecular Biology say they have figured out how a macromolecular machine is able to unwind the long and twisted tangles…

You've heard it before.   According to the laws of physics, bees can't fly.   Yet fly they do.   And British zoologist Sir James Gray noticed something strange about dolphins in 1936.…

A new species of bacterium that causes leprosy has been identified through intensive genetic analysis of a pair of lethal infections, a research team reports in the December issue of the American…

New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT. This project,…

A study published in Journal of the American Water Resources Association states that the "Green Great Wall," a forest shelterbelt project in northern China running nearly parallel to the Great Wall,…

A new frog species has been discovered in Panama and will be announced in the December issue of Journal of Herpetology by a research team led by STRI former visiting scientist Joseph Mendelson, from…

A reconstruction of an extreme warm period shows the sensitivity of the climate system to changes in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as well as the strong influence of ocean temperatures, heat transport…

A growth hormone that had shown some promise for treating people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) showed no benefit in a new study published in Neurology.  Two previous, shorter studies…