For years, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have been working on origami robots — reconfigurable machines that can fold themselves into arbitrary shapes. In Science, they report their latest…

When it comes to elephants, the Wildlife Conservation Society does not believe in conservation. Or sustainability. Instead, existing ivory must be destroyed and legal ivory markets need to be…

Throughout the 1990s, biofuels were the environmental rage. Everyone from Vice-President Al Gore to Greenpeace touted them as the replacement for fossil fuels. The future belonged to such renewable…

In California, wildfires happen thousands of times per year, even in non-drought years. They happened long before climate change concerns but not factoring wildfires into simplistic parameter-based…

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is…

A nasal brush test can rapidly and accurately diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Up to now, a definitive CJD diagnosis requires…

Your stress levels may be another thing you can blame on your mother. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could…

Southern California is aghast that cities are now enforcing water usage cutbacks during the ongoing drought - it's because during the mandatory restrictions, while the farming regions of central…

Slippery as an eel may be a popular phrase but it turns out they are a lot easier to catch when marine vessels make noise nearby. In a Global Change Biology paper, researchers from the Universities…

Mutations in a gene named CTR9 gene that helps regulate when genes are switched on and off in cells have been found to cause rare cases of Wilms tumor, the most common kidney cancer occurring in…

Europe is so far ahead of the US in its thinking on antibiotics and antibiotic resistance that we should all be ashamed. For the last 15 years, Europe has led the way on the regulatory front making…

The 21st century will be the century of the 'smart home', where your home and your portable technology all interact seamlessly with one another. In the 21st century, smart homes won't be just…

Juvenile loggerhead turtles don't just passively drift through life, they swim into oncoming ocean currents, according to a new study. After loggerhead turtle hatchlings leave nesting beaches, they…

Lanternsharks produce and perceive bioluminescent light in order to communicate, find prey, and camouflage themselves against predators in the mesopelagic twilight zone. The mesopelagic twilight…

Parasite is colloquially a bad word but about half of all known species are parasites and biologists have long hypothesized that the strategy of leeching off other organisms is a major driver of…

Brief, acute psychological stress promoted healing in mouse models of three different types of skin irritations, according to a study the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.  The…

Since President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer over 40 years ago, survival rates have improved dramatically and cancer rates have even gone down, despite claims that everything from DDT to…

Human milk is obviously baby food, but for sick, hospitalized infants, it's also medicine, according to a series of articles in Advances in Neonatal Care devoted to best practices in providing human…

You aren't always what you eat – and that's a good thing. It's also why pesticides in reasonable usage haven't harmed arctic mammals such as caribou. Not only can caribou metabolize some current-use…

Big Data And The Internet Of Things are all the rage, to such an extent they have become anything people want them to mean - they are becoming Smurfs of the technology lexicon.  I feel their…