It may not sound like a great thing for your backyard festivities but scientists have figured out how to make the fruit fly live longer. Luckily, humans will get something out of the deal -namely…

Though the dense humid forests of Central Africa have been regarded as among the most pristine on Earth, the expansion of industrial logging and the accompanying proliferation of road density are…

Have you ever been trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle and been gripped by a sinking feeling that maybe you were stuck with a lemon? That maybe the puzzle you are struggling with actually has no solution…

The Milky Way's total mass is about 100 billion solar masses - enormous to us but average among galaxies. It spirals around a black hole that is about three million solar masses, say cosmologists.…

Egon has just posted about Nature Precedings, which looks like a no-brainer as an additional publication outlet for UsefulChem. I've requested an account and we'll see how it works. In my view,…

Much cooler than a flaming Optimus Prime, more practical than Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot - they're rescue robots, and they're here to help. NIST engineers are organizing the fourth in a series…

This week's issue of Science has a book review (subscription required unfortunately) of Michael's Behe's latest effort to defend Intelligent Design Creationism. Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge…

The peculiar pose of many fossilized dinosaurs, with wide-open mouth, head thrown back and recurved tail, likely results from the agonized death throes typical of brain damage and asphyxiation,…

In the internet age, when 120,000,000 smart people on Digg can see an article about your technology, it takes some real courage to use the term "unbreakable", but the guys at NIST are doing just that…

Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe. But what preceded these pre-life steps? A pair…

Key milk nutrients, calcium and vitamin D, may do more than just help keep your bones strong. Increasing intake of calcium and vitamin D could reduce the risk for cancer in women by at least 60…

A new novel about Sherlock Holmes or, my favorite, The Saint? No, this really happened in an operating room in St Paul’s Hospital, British Columbia. Dr. Alana Flexman, Dr. Stephan Schwarz and Dr.…

  Recent events and news stories have had a familiar feel to me.  It is because many of them had been part of my predictions for 2007 that I published here in January.  When something…

Johns Hopkins researchers have found a way to directly observe cell migration -- in real time and in living tissue. The scientists say their advance could lead to strategies for controlling both…

Breast cancer survivors who eat a healthy diet and exercise moderately can reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by half, regardless of their weight, suggests a new longitudinal study from…

PG-13 films have lots of “happy violence,” say UCLA researchers. Borrowing from the late communications theorist George Gerbner, happy violence is that which is “cool, swift, and painless.” PG-13…

By uncovering how one breast cancer drug protects the heart and another does not, Duke University Medical Center researchers believe they may have opened up a new way to screen drugs for possible…

It's long been thought that humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction. Anthropogenic global hunting, as it were. Or that a cataclysmic event did the trick. It may be neither of those and just…

A year-long clinical trial by Penn State researchers shows that diets focusing on foods that are low in calorie density - high in water and low in fat, like fruits, vegetables, soup, lean meat, and…

Genetically modified (GM) crops may contribute to increased productivity in sustainable agriculture, according to a new study which analyzes, for the first time, environmental impact data from field…