With the help of genetically engineered mice whose livers turned into glowing light bulbs, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have illuminated the underpinnings of an insidious…

According to new research, two key proteins join together at the precise location where energy of motion is turned into electrical impulses. These proteins, cadherin 23 and protocadherin 15, are part…

A new research study at Northwestern University is investigating innovative ways to rehabilitate people with lousy health habits. Bonnie Spring, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern's…

Cholera is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium, the bacillus Vibrio cholerae. In 2004 there were 101,383 cases - 95,000 in Africa - resulting in 2,345 deaths, according to the World Health…

A recent simulation has shown that thin layers of ice could persist on specially treated diamond coatings at temperatures well above body temperature, which could make ice-coated-diamond films an…

I welcome the blog from Michael Bailey this morning, and thank him for contributing it. This is the first time I am aware of where an exchange can take place in an open forum. Bailey's passages help…

It's hardly surprising that clinically depressed people act differently than healthy people. Quantifying the difference, however, can be difficult. Now a collaboration of physicists and psychiatrists…

While we are a long way off from the lightweight, high-performance, magical cloak of Harry Potter, physicists have been busy designing ways to make invisibility possible. A recent theoretical…

Several genes with strong associations to schizophrenia have evolved rapidly due to selection during human evolution, according to researchers who found a higher prevalence of the influence of so…

According to new research at the University of Virginia Health System, N-acetylcysteine (NAC), an anti-oxidant commonly used in nutritional and body-building supplements, can form a red blood cell…

Both in her recent appearance on KQED’s Forum talk show and in her blog, Stanford University’s Joan Roughgarden continues her campaign to discredit me and my book, The Man Who Would Be Queen.…

An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturization, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight,…

Bog mummies are 2000-year-old mummies from the Iron Age that were preserved with amazing detail by the peat bogs of Europe. Physical anthropologists draw conclusions from the eerily preserved hair,…

Bears don't rub trees because their backs are itchy. Dr Owen Nevin of the University of Cumbria states that adult male grizzly bears use so-called “rub trees” as a way to communicate with each other…

By 1763, the world of Cherokee Indians in the Southeastern U.S. was in tatters. The French and Indian War had wracked the sprawling Cherokee settlements that stretched from the headwaters of the…

252 million years ago a mass extinction of cataclysmic proportions occurred and the world was changed forever. Prior to that, ocean life was diverse and clam-like organisms called brachiopods…

The Aurigid meteor shower peaked on September 1, originating from C/1911 N1 Kiess, or comet Kiess, a long-period comet that takes about 2000 years to orbit the Sun. It was discovered in 1935 by Carl…

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found that a single gene might control whether or not individuals tend to pile on fat, a discovery that may point to new ways to fight obesity and…

Amihai Mazar, Eleazar L. Sukenik Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University, revealed that the first apiary (beehive colony) dating from the Biblical period has been found in excavations he…

Eminem should be reading up on his Elvis history if he wants to stay around. Famous musicians are more than twice as likely as the rest of the population to die an early death, and within a few…