Organic farming boosts biodiversity - at least that is the claim of organic farmers. But it depends. It's a $35 billion business and there are plenty of gigantic organic mega-farms that aren't…

Sorry Malcolm Gladwell, and you positive thinking book buyers at Whole Foods, you are not going to be a world-class sprinter no matter how much you practice unless you were born with exceptional…

A new study has affirmed what most of us knew - practice makes perfect, but only if you have some ability. In the nature versus nurture debate, Usain Bolt is still going to run faster than most…

Want to teach a robot to tend the garden? It will go faster if you let the crowd help. University of Washington computer scientists at the 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers…

ZOOLOGISTS ANNOUNCED THE discovery of a tiny, super-cute new primate which can kill a human by licking its elbow. I am not making this up.  The new species of loris found in the Philippines has…

Do you remember the top quark asymmetry measurements of CDF and DZERO ? A few years ago they caused quite some excitement, as both experiments were observing a departure from standard model…

YOU’VE SEEN THE REPORTS a thousand times. Samsung is now ahead of Apple in the smartphone wars, the media says. I’m looking at BBC news while writing this, and there we have the same story, freshly…

By trapping a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla, roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet, in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide…

A study of triple-negative breast cancer raises the prospect that some patients with aggressive tumors may benefit from a class of anti-inflammatory drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. The…

Neurons are vital to the functional organization of the central nervous system. Multiple cell types are present within any brain structure, but the rules governing their positioning, and the…

Rifampicin and related drugs are important antibiotics in the "drug cocktail" that cures tuberculosis in about 6 months. But two forms of tuberculosis, referred to as "multi-drug-resistant," or MDR,…

Obviously, as the creators of the four pillars of the Science 2.0 concept, we're interested in new ways to use data to make meaningful decisions, but we recognize that key breakthroughs are more…

As carbon dioxide (CO2) in America has declined, environmentalists and the federal government have begun to focus on the energy that got us CO2 emissions back at early 1990s levels - natural gas.…

If your child spends their evening beating up hookers in Grand Theft Auto, there is a silver lining - they are less likely to actually beat up hookers in real life. At least surveys by humanities…

A new study has found that palladium-gold nanoparticles are excellent catalysts for cleaning polluted water - and can even convert biodiesel waste into valuable chemicals. In dozens of studies, Rice…

Signals from the immune system that help repel common parasites  like tapeworms, roundworms and other helminths can inadvertently cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, which…

You wouldn't think that mechanical force, like kicking a ball in the World Cup or embossing letters on a credit card, could process nanoparticles more subtly than the most advanced chemistry but a…

How bad is western music? Chimps in a study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition preferred silence - yet they liked music from Africa. And music from…

You can't coddle kids or their brains too much. Without a little bit of frustration and stress, they would never learn how to talk or read or do science. Without some physical stress, we would all be…

Scientists working to make gene therapy a reality say they have figured out how to bypass a blood stem cell's natural defenses and efficiently insert disease-fighting genes into the cell's genome.…