The traditional Mediterranean diet provides substantial protection against type 2 diabetes, according to a study published on bmj.com today. The Mediterreanean diet is rich in olive oil, grains,…

A lathe may be a critical machine shop tool for a manufacturing plants, but what tools go into an industrial biological machine shop? Biological tools are in common use in many manufacturing…

What do you get when you cross the founder of Wikipedia with Cambridge biologist Michael Ashburner and about a million other people? An article in Genome Biology, that's what. It's WikiProteins, the…

Just below the water's surface lies a magical world teeming with life and value. Coral reefs are home to 4,000 fish species and provide the world with goods and services — such as jobs, foods,…

Do you ever get the feeling that science figures out a problem a few years after the fact, but then discovers that their methods for fixing the problem are also hopelessly outdated or just plain…

“Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as…

Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 and has perplexed, astounded and inspired scientists since, but to most it can be thought of as "frictionless" electricity. In conventional electricity, heat…

The snowball Earth hypothesis posits that the Earth was covered from pole to pole in a thick sheet of ice for millions of years at a time. 635 million years ago, an abrupt release of methane from…

"The universe is a big place, and weird things can happen. I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before,…

We started off discussing the value of consumerism to even the most devout naturalists with In Praise Of Consumerism - It Appeals To The Thoreau In You and then discussed the materialistic greed of…

Throughout the overlooked depths of Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes, a small but important animal is rapidly disappearing. Until recently, the animal - a shrimplike, energy-dense creature called…

Would you like a side of food poisoning with that salad? Salmonella can infect plant cells and successfully evade all the defense mechanisms of plants so cleaning the surfaces of raw fruits and…

Amyloid deposits in tissues and organs are linked to a number of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type II diabetes, and prion diseases such as BSE. However, amyloids are not just…

Lusi, the world’s fastest-growing mud volcano, is collapsing and could subside to depths of more than 140 meters with consequences for the surrounding environment, according to new research. As the…

Dozens of studies show collagen repair is possible and demonstrate why three types of available skin treatments, topical retinoic acid, carbon dioxide laser resurfacing and injections of cross-linked…

Researchers at The University of Nottingham have taken some important first steps to creating a synthetic copycat of a living cell. Dr Cameron Alexander and PhD student George Pasparakis in the have…

Charlotte Eklund-Jonsson at the Department of Food Science, Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden says the results of her doctoral dissertation could be a new vegetarian food that boosts the…

You went to a wedding yesterday. The service was beautiful, the food and drink flowed and there was dancing all night. But people tell you that you are in hospital, that you have been in hospital for…

The world's first optical pacemaker is described in an article published today in Optics Express. A team of scientists at Osaka University in Japan show that powerful, but very short, laser pulses…

How do you distinguish a male fly from a female fly? Apparently even flies have problems with this one sometimes, and an interesting paper in PNAS describes a recently evolved gene in fruit flies…