Controlling the properties and behavior of matter at the smallest scale—in effect, "domesticating atoms"—can help to overcome some of the world’s biggest challenges, concludes a new report on how…

Imagine a world where damaged organs in your body—kidneys, liver, heart—can be stimulated to heal themselves. Envision people tragically paralyzed whose injured spinal cords can be repaired. Think…

Want to keep kids thin? Clore Laboratory at the University of Buckingham is supplementing infant formula and other baby foods with leptin,the hunger hormone. Researchers say it could provide…

EU legislation to promote the uptake of biodiesel will not make any difference to global warming, and could potentially result in greater emissions of greenhouse gases than from conventional…

A spectacular fossilised forest has transformed our understanding of the ecology of the Earth’s first rainforests. It is 300 million years old. The forest is composed of a bizarre mixture of extinct…

Medical professionals conducting clinical trials should provide more information about financial conflicts of interest before they talk to patients about participating in the trials. That is one of…

Earlier this week, I was contacted by Daniel Zaharevitz, Chief of the Information Technology Branch of the Developmental Therapeutics Program at the National Cancer Institute. He is also involved…

I often find that books on the history of science and technology are fun to read because they give me an opportunity to try to forget what I know about how things turned out and piece together an…

New research from Columbia's Primate Cognition Laboratory has demonstrated for the first time that monkeys could acquire meta-cognitive skills: the ability to reflect about their thoughts and to…

Cilia, tiny hair-like structures that propel mucus out of airways, have to agree on the direction of the fluid flow to get things moving. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies…

Huntington’s disease, an inherited neurodegenerative disorder that affects roughly 30,000 Americans, is incurable and fatal. But a new discovery about how cells repair their DNA points to a possible…

Ultra-hard materials are used for everything from drills that bore for oil and build new roads to scratch-resistant coatings for precision instruments and the face of your watch. UCLA scientists…

An effective way to fight leukemia might be to knock out a specific protein that protects cancer cells from dying, a new study shows. The findings suggest that a drug that can block this "survival…

Using a new type of drug that targets a specific genetic defect, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, along with colleagues at PTC Therapeutics Inc. and the University…

Crohn’s disease is a chronic relapsing inflammatory disorder of the intestinal tract that affects an estimated 0.15% of people in the developed world. Common symptoms include abdominal pain and…

Scientists have discovered one of the reasons why bladder cancer is so much more prevalent in men than women: A molecular receptor or protein that is much more active in men than women plays a role…

Serotonin is a major signaling chemical in the brain, and it has long been thought to be involved in aggressive behavior in a wide variety of animals as well as in humans. Another brain chemical…

A new study says targeting smaller (¡Ü5 mm) lesions does little to significantly reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) and, in fact, results in extremely high financial costs and a large…

Mayo Clinic researchers, along with collaborators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and University of Oslo, Norway, have discovered that a miscue of the body’s genetic repair system may…

We just ran a quiz race in Second Life for the second time yesterday in my organic chemistry class. Two of the students were physically with me in the classroom and two were coming in remotely.…