When a cell divides, it passes through a sequence of complex events and mitochondria, the organelles called the power plants of the cell, are the main source of energy for these processes: They…

8 percent of our genome derives from retroviruses that inserted themselves into human sex cells millions of years ago and right now the koala retrovirus (KoRV) is invading koala genomes. Koalas are…

Though the World Series is over, baseball never really ends in the modern era. There are MVP announcements, free agency and then the winter meetings. Before we know it, it will be February and…

Patients with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, have difficulty with action verbs: Why action verbs and not regular verbs or nouns?  According to some…

This is a commonly used argument, indeed often taken for granted. We can simulate physics on a computer. So, the argument goes, what is to stop us eventually simulating your whole body including your…

In the NFL, teams share revenue from national television contracts and to sell local tickets, if a team has not sold at least to a specific threshold, the game is blacked out locally. If enough…

Proof of life beyond earth is coming. Stargazing image via Shutterstock By David A. Weintraub, Vanderbilt University How will humankind react after astronomers hand over rock-solid scientific…

Let’s talk about gastrulation. For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s not as disgusting as it sounds. Gastrulation is a process in early embryonic development which leads to the generation of the…

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford By Ian Bailey, Lancaster University Scientists working on an experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US have taken a step…

Over a mile beneath the West African ocean, off the coast of Angola, are over 2,000 mounds of asphalt containing a wealth of deep-water creatures. A paper in Deep-Sea Research 1 examined the…

Sunglasses are the first line of defense for celebrities. Marie Havens/Shutterstock By Vanessa Brown, Nottingham Trent University The fame of Lady Gaga is the stand-out phenomenon of 21st-century…

Will the medicines you take make their way back into your food?  They might, especially of you take your cue from an old Yorkshire song which deals with human recycling in the food chain, via…

Think of our poor sister world Venus – almost the same size as Earth, it probably had oceans at the beginning. But Venus orbits closer to the sun -- and was never in the Continuously Habitable…

"In space no one can hear you scream" was the tagline for the movie Alien. I finally created a Twitter account, but in Twitter, if you have no followers, no one can read your tweets. You are…

What is the best way to learn a dance sequence? Professional dancers make it look easy. A choreographer rattles off a long list of moves, kicks and turns and the dancers somehow remember it all. But…

An experiment with 42 people under functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that if people see pictures of others being loved and cared for, it subsequently reduces the brain's threat…

It’s been a disappointing couple of weeks for the Scotch whisky industry. Diageo reported that it is delaying plans on a £1 billion new-build distillery just north of Inverness following a slow-…

In World War II, did people with bird feeders have substantially different chirping friends than we see today? Probably not, but a group of researchers warns than 2075 might look a lot less like then…

Opioid-involved overdoses in the United States have dramatically increased in the last 15 years, largely due to a rise in prescription opioid (PO) use. Emerging evidence suggests the increase is…

Last year, two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announced the finding of a new elementary particle - the long-theorized Higgs particle.  Many calculations indicate that the particle…