Some materials change their electrical resistance in the presence of an external electromagnetic field. This concept is fundamental to data storage. Understanding large resistance changes, known as…

Six American high-school students took the top honors in the 2007 International Linguistics Olympiad in St. Petersburg, Russia earlier this month. This year was the first time a delegation…

Are too many people now diagnosed as having depression? Two experts give their views. Professor Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist from Australia says the current threshold for what is considered to be…

The biggest problem for controlling hypertension (high blood pressure) is compliance with treatment, states an editorial in this week’s Lancet. “Despite very effective and cost-effective treatments,…

Scientists have discovered a key mechanism involved in the correct separation of chromosomes during the formation of eggs and sperm. The research shows that BubR1 - a gene recently shown to affect…

For mice, carbon dioxide often means danger — too many animals breathing in too small a space or a hungry predator exhaling nearby. Mice have a way of detecting carbon dioxide, and new research from…

Astronomers have discovered a chaotic scene unlike any witnessed before in a cosmic “train wreck” between giant galaxy clusters. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes revealed a…

Scientists have determined for the first time the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions. "Never before have we seen so clearly,…

Wastewater treatment plants are designed primarily to eliminate nutrients. However, attention is increasingly being focused on micropollutants, since even low concentrations of these substances can…

Pressures and temperatures at the Earth’s core are stupendous – more than 3.5 Mbar and 7000K – and currently it is impossible to recreate these conditions in the laboratory. Our information about…

Prof. Yadin Dudai, Head of the Weizmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department, and his colleagues recently discovered that the process of storing long-term memories is much more dynamic than previously…

Most modern attempts to decipher how portions of genetic code are translated into physical characteristics are akin to a first-grader trying to sound out a word letter by letter — or, in this case,…

Kaiping Peng, a friend of mine who is a professor at Berkeley, recently said to me that professors have an unusual place in our society: They are expected to tell the truth. Hardly anyone else is, he…

Natural selection has driven two closely related species of fish in Lake Malawi down different evolutionary paths - even though they live side by side. An international team of scientists from Canada…

A team of researchers investigating cholesterol and lipid transport has performed experiments that cast serious doubt on the dominant hypothesis of how the body rids its cells of "bad" cholesterol…

Most people understand how liquids freeze as solid crystals when temperatures become cold enough, like water droplets crystallizing into snowflakes or molten glass hardening into solid glass. Latter…

By using pulses of light to dramatically accelerate quantum computers, University of Michigan researchers have made strides in technology that could foil national and personal security threats. It's…

Scientists have discovered a new protein that may offer fresh insights into brain function in mad cow disease. “Our team has defined a second prion protein called ‘Shadoo’, that exists in addition to…

All bad jokes aside, their research represents a step forward in computers reaching the capability of a human mind. "This work has a relationship to 'Sociable Computing,'" says Larry Mazlack.…

Brain imaging has revealed a breakdown in normal patterns of emotional processing that impairs the ability of people with clinical depression to suppress negative emotional states. Efforts by…