Neuroscientists have discovered brain circuitry for encoding positive and negative learned associations in mice. After finding that two circuits showed opposite activity following fear and reward…

Greenland climate during the last ice age was very unstable, the researchers say, characterized by a number of large, abrupt changes in mean annual temperature that each occurred within several…

When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at about 28,000 miles/second, close to one sixth the speed of light. Now researchers can…

When consumers taste cheap wine and rate it highly because under the belief it is expensive, is it just a placebo or has belief actually changed their brain function, causing them to experience the…

The occurrence of altruism and spite - helping or harming others at a cost to oneself - depends on similarity not just between two interacting individuals but also to the rest of their neighbors,…

A study has shown a new way that brown fat, a potential obesity-fighting target, is regulated in the body.  In an upcoming Cell Metabolism article,  researchers examined long non-coding RNA…

Agriculture is a breathtaking achievement of modern science. We are on the path to being able to feed the world for the first time in history and the upward trend in obesity is due to the fact that…

It's a First World Idyll that ancient indigenous people sustained themselves using nature's bounty, in harmony with the land. Science knows otherwise. Instead, from Alaska to Washington,…

On April 25th, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, claiming over 5,000 lives and affecting millions more. Relief efforts are under way and satellite imagery is helping to visualize the damage…

The world's population is getting healthier and part of that reason for that is sanitation - but a larger population and a still limited infrastructure means a complex and multi-dimensional approach…

British people may not like blood rain but Sahara Desert dust is not traveling 2,000 miles over an ocean just to make their cars dirty - it also helps cool things down.  Researchers have…

Genetic variation is important in a healthy population and recombination, or crossing-over, which occurs when sperm and egg cells are formed and segments of each chromosome pair are interchanged, is…

Every day, thousands of people need donated blood but blood transfusions require that the blood type of the donor match that of the recipient., unless it is blood without A- or B-type antigens,…

Economic sanctions and divestment campaigns are attractive but often flawed tactics for accomplishing international political goals. The social stigma the campaigns create often fails to match the…

"B.W. Lee also carries much of the responsibility for calling the Higgs boson the Higgs boson, mentioning repeatedly 'Higgs scalar fields' in a review talk at the International Conference on High-…

Self-driving cars are expected to revolutionize the automobile industry. Rapid advances have led to working prototypes faster than most people expected. The anticipated benefits of this emerging…

Scientists have mapped the human genes triggered by the phytonutrients in soy, revealing the complex role the legume plays in both preventing and advancing breast cancer. Compounds in minimally…

New genetic testing of Iñupiat people currently living in Alaska's North Slope has determined the migration patterns and ancestral pool of the people who populated the North American Arctic over the…

Some of the ocean's underwater volcanoes did not erupt from hot spots in the Earth's mantle but instead formed from cracks or fractures in the oceanic crust, which would help explain the spectacular…

Climate change may have been be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2,000 B.C. - but it wasn't the modern political connotation of climate…