The past few days have been quite stimulating. The SciFoo conference started right after I got off the plane in San Francisco on Friday evening around 18:00 and lasted till midnight. With the jetlag…

It's well known that physical exercise is good for the brain but what about when age takes away the ability to exercise as much? Can mental exercise close the gap? Yes, say researchers at Yale. For…

Last week, it was announced that drug addicts in England are to be given shopping vouchers for complying with treatment programs. Rewarding patients to cooperate is not new, argues Tom Burns, a…

The discovery of a novel molecular switch that powerfully modulates nerve cell activity offers the potential for new mood disorder and epilepsy treatments, University of California, Irvine…

For years, scientists have searched in vain for slivers of the brain that might drive the dramatic differences between male and female behavior. Now biologists at Harvard University say these efforts…

MIT neuroscientists exploring how memory formation differs between children and adults have found that although the two groups have much in common, maturity brings richer memories. The MIT team…

Cancer causing mutations occur in our bodies every day – but luckily, we have specific genes that recognize these malignant events and keep cells from growing out of control. Only a few of these…

With the finding that fever is produced by the action of a hormone on a specific site in the brain, scientists have answered a key question as to how this adaptive function helps to protect the body…

Ocean historians affiliated with the Census of Marine Life have painted the first detailed portrait of a burst of fishing from 1900 to 1950 that preceded the collapse of once abundant bluefin tuna…

When explorers like Magellan and Columbus sailed from Europe to the New World 500 years ago, they amazingly managed to navigate the open sea without terrestrial landmarks, natural boundaries or the…

Scientists at the Institute for Stem Cell Research, of the University of Edinburgh show that mouse embryonic stem cells need the protein FGF4 to become competent to be converted into specialized cell…

Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the most severe forms of human malaria. Invasion of host red blood cells is an essential step of the complex life cycle of this parasite. During the process…

A new UC Davis study that explains the actions of a gene mutation that causes early onset cancer provides a fundamental insight into the mechanism of DNA-break repair. People with Bloom's syndrome, a…

A group of Chemists from the University of Leicester have developed a way of purifying biodiesel made from vegetable oils, which is cheap, simple and low in toxicity. The team, led by Professor…

“The monopolar radiofrequency (RF) technology, which was introduced five years ago and which is credited as the first non-surgical skin-tightening device, has been the catalyst for what is now an…

Autistic children are doubly stigmatized. On the one hand, they are often dismissed as “low functioning” or mentally retarded, especially if they have poor speaking skills as many do. Yet when…

One of the unique characteristics of humans that distinguish us from the animal kingdom is the ability to represent others’ beliefs in our own minds. This sort of intuitive mind-reading, according to…

The length of heat waves in Europe has doubled and the frequency of extremely hot days has nearly tripled in the past century, according to new research. The new data shows that many previous…

Special effects in movies have always had a problem: water drops are a consistent size. The one thing that always tips a viewer off in old movies are water drops that look huge next to scaled models.…

On the night of 21 July, ESO astronomer Yuri Beletsky took images of the night sky above Paranal, the 2600m high mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert home to ESO's Very Large Telescope. The amazing…