For me, it was hornets. One summer afternoon when I was 12, I ran into an overgrown field near a friend’s house and kicked a hornet nest the size of a football. An angry squadron of insects clamped…

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF), an immune system regulatory protein that promotes inflammation, also helps regulate sensitivity to bitter taste, a finding which may provide a mechanism to explain the…

Many scientists assume that the growing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will accelerate plant growth but a new study suggests much of this growth will be curtailed by limited soil nutrients…

Have you ever wondered what those food additive numbers in the ingredients list on your food packaging meant and what they were really doing to your body? A recent study suggests emulsifiers –…

Sweet potatoes, one of the most important food crops for human consumption, contain genes from the bacterium Agrobacterium but that was not done by scientists. The foreign DNA that turned sweet…

Besides being a giant triumph of theoretical physics and the definitive seal on the correctness of the Standard Model -at least at the energies at which we are capable of investigating particle…

23-year-old "wellness" guru Belle Gibson claimed in spring 2013 to have cured her terminal brain cancer using her diet.  She quickly became Australia's version of Vani Hari, "The Food Babe", so…

A study of disease dynamics in a California grassland has shed light on fundamental principles underlying the spread of pathogens among species, according to researchers at the University of…

Researchers have determined that the eardrum evolved independently in mammals and diapsids - the taxonomic group that includes reptiles and birds. Published in Nature Communications, the work shows…

Nerve cells come in very different shapes and a new paper reveals why, in insects, the cell body is usually located at the end of a separate extension. Nerve cells follow a functional design: They…

Stegosaurus, a large, herbivorous dinosaur with two staggered rows of bony plates along its back and two pairs of spikes at the end of its tail, lived roughly 150 million years ago during the Late…

The famous Vitruvian Man, drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, pictures the canon of human's proportions - though we did not become bilaterally symmetric all at once. There are two main points of view on the…

As we celebrate Earth Day this week, it is an opportune time to recognize that not all Americans have equally enjoyed the dividends of our nation’s environmental protections. Decades of research…

Forget vibrating joysticks on your Xbox, Rice University engineers have invented a glove that allows a user to feel what they're touching while gaming. The Hands Omni provides a way for gamers…

Invasive plants animals and plants spreading is not new but predicting the dynamics of these invasions is difficult - and of great ecological and socioeconomical interest. Scientists at Eawag and…

Today the New York Times published an op-ed by Newt Gingrich where he calls for doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health here in the US.  Who can argue with that? Mr. Gingrich…

More boys are born than girls: this is a fact. In the western world the ‘sex ratio’ is around 105 boys for every 100 girls, but this changes through history.  And rather remarkably, it peaks at…

Ghana has plenty of water. So why do its people buy plastic pouches from street vendors? Shaun Raviv investigates. When Johnnie Water was a schoolboy in the Volta Region of Ghana, he and his…

A new study of animal behavior suggests that evolution is hard at work when it comes to the acrobatic courtship dances of  male golden-collared manakins, a tropical bird species. There are about…

We are still trying to fully understand the extent of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill five years ago, one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. Following the…