Dr. Berend Stoel from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), in collaboration with renowned luthier Terry Borman, has put classical violins in a CT scanner and discovered that the homogeneity…

My Dear Sir,-- The accompanying papers, which we have the honour of communicating to the Linnean Society, and which all relate to the same subject, viz. the Laws which affect the Production of…

Thoughts of Encouragement are always helpful. I would like to tell you a story of hope. It’s really a simple story. It was a dark day in my life when my mother died and our father left us. I was four…

Lilacs, though native to East Asia and Southeast Europe, were brought to North America by the first settlers and were sold in American nurseries as early as 1800. The oldest living lilacs in North…

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has sequenced the equivalent of 300 human genomes in just over six months, reaching a staggering 1,000,000,000,000 letters of genetic code that will be read by…

I had a series of posts on Ye Olde Genomicron about what people actually said regarding "junk DNA" and non-function in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. I have been meaning to repackage this material for a…

Scientific wordsmith Carl Zimmer, most recently the author of the widely touted book Microcosm, has left Scienceblogs (the blog network by Seed Magazine) and taken up a new post as blogger and…

Recipe to recover more quickly from exercise: Finish workout, eat pasta, and wash down with five or six cups of strong coffee. Glycogen, the muscle's primary fuel source during exercise, is…

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those effects appear to last…

Adult cells of mice created from genetically reprogrammed cells can be triggered via drug to enter an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, without the need for further genetic alteration, a discovery…

A small protein may have a big role in helping you make more bone and less fat, says Dr. Xingming Shi, bone biologist at the Medical College of Georgia Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics.…

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the administration of minute amounts of inhaled or intravenous hydrogen sulfide, or H2S – the molecule that gives rotten eggs their sulfurous…

Epigenetic mechanisms are at the heart of developmental biology, orchestrating the formation of many different tissues and organs from a fertilised egg. Almost all cells in an individual have…

"Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to ...," said Buckaroo Banzai while doing brain surgery in an early scene from one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. He…

Few places on Earth are as untouched as the "Crown of the Continent" — a 10-million-acre expanse of mountains, valleys and prairies in Montana and Canada. The area has sustained all the same species…

Here we go again, this time it is Stuart Kauffman’s turn to write silly things about science and religion. Kauffman is a serious and brilliant scientist, best known for his work on…

We all know that light effects the growth and development of plants but a new paper by Nathalie Hoang et al., published in PLoS Biology examines the effects light has on humans and animals. In…

Children studying subjects like math, physics and chemistry have a harder time gettings A's than students of similar ability studying subjects like media studies and psychology, according to a new…

"I want to say one word to you. Just one word," spoke Mr. Maguire to young Benjamin in the 1967 film The Graduate. That word was 'plastics' and it became a cultural litany meaning lots of different…

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have gone beyond manipulating adult stem cells cultured in the lab and achieved the same feat with adult neural stem cells - still in place in…