Nothing justifies the killing of people for expressing ideas no matter how repugnant one finds them. However, these things don't happen in a vacuum. These things are not simply the fault of the…

An affordable vaccine that has all but rid the 'meningitis belt' of a major cause of deadly epidemics is now going to be available for infants all across sub-Saharan Africa.  One of the most…

Academic wizardry. Shutterstock By Nick Butler, Lund University and Sverre Spoelstra, Lund University When McDonald’s came under sustained criticism from campaigners in the 1980s, the company…

Northern Europeans pride themselves on being tougher than the rest of Europe when it comes to enduring weather. While most people are more likely to die in bad weather, a new paper finds that…

A paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine links circumcision in boys to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results were drawn from part a cohort of all children born in Denmark…

Hypertension - high blood pressure - affects up to 80 million people in the United States and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death so lowering blood pressure has the potential to save…

Can cancer biopsies spread more cancer? Some patients, and a few doctors think so.  Fine needle aspiration is a minimally invasive technique that uses a thin and hollow needle to extract a few…

Hydrogen fuel cells may be the best option for powering zero-emission vehicles, Toyota will make them available in the United States in 2015, but those fuel cells require an electrocatalyst -- a…

The terrorist attack of two days ago in Paris to the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo left most of us hit hard by the blow to freedom of the press and freedom of thought, which are among that core…

Social attitudes are reinforcing the negative beliefs towards people who self harm, according to an analysis of the life stories of people who self-harm and who were also diagnosed with a…

Making sure school-aged kids get to sleep at a regular hour is often a struggle for parents but it’s well worth the effort. The researchers behind a new paper say that a good night’s sleep is linked…

Yesterday (8th) I took this photograph of Venus and Mercury from the grounds of Reading University. In the photograph, Mercury is about two moon-breadths down and to the right of Venus. …

Ocean Currents in the South Asian Archipelago The losses of AirAsia QX8501 and Malaysia Airlines MH370 are tragic.  I hope that the relatives may find some comfort in the knowledge that their…

Could climate change be making flying more unsafe? KamrenB Photography, CC BY By Todd Lane, University of Melbourne On December 28, AirAsia flight QZ8501 crashed into the sea between Indonesia and…

There is no more important universal problem in the Standard Model of elementary particles than the problem of mass and mixing flavor hierarchies. The mainstream theoretical approach for treating it…

By studying the motions of different stellar populations in the disk of the Andromeda galaxy, researchers have deduced that Andromeda has had a more violent past than our Milky Way.  The…

It won't exactly set off a Blu-ray versus HD-DVD cultural firestorm, but there is an alternative to 3-D printing. And it's better in many ways.  Pop-up assembly relies on compression buckling.…

Games have been test beds for new ideas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) since computers came on the scene and there have been significant milestones - Deep Blue sort of defeated Kasparov in chess and…

In an interstellar race against time, astronomers measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star and determined the mass of a neutron star just before it vanished from view. The…

Up close and personal with the demon shrimp. Amaia Green Etxabe - University of Portsmouth By Alex Ford,University of Portsmouth Demon vs killer shrimp sounds like the latest CGI movie to come out of…