How Fruit Flies Detect Sweet Foods

How Fruit Flies Detect Sweet Foods

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Insects represent remarkable diversity and have adapted to all sorts of ecological nooks and crannies. For example, they have taste receptors — novel proteins — with which they…
Weighing Particles At The Attogram Scale

Weighing Particles At The Attogram Scale

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT engineers have devised a way to measure the mass of particles with a resolution better than an attogram — one millionth of a trillionth of a gram. Weighing these tiny particles,…
MACRO Test Detects Genetic Modification In Food

MACRO Test Detects Genetic Modification In Food

As food science continues to advance, so do calls to label and ban foods that have been modified using modern techniques. In GMOs, the genes of some plants used for food are tweaked to make them more…
Atlas Sees No Light From Quantum Black Holes

Atlas Sees No Light From Quantum Black Holes

Black holes are all the rage these days, with theorists arguing about firewalls and Hawking's paper being handled by the press in rather improper ways. Meanwhile at the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS…
Loss Of Biodiversity Limits Toxin Degradation

Loss Of Biodiversity Limits Toxin Degradation

You might not think of microbes when you consider biodiversity, but it turns out that even a moderate loss of less than 5% of soil microbes may compromise some key ecosystem functions and could lead…
Ice-loving Sea Anemones Discovered In Antarctica

Ice-loving Sea Anemones Discovered In Antarctica

Lincoln, Neb., Jan. 16, 2014 -- Using a camera-equipped robot to explore beneath the Ross Ice Shelf off Antarctica, scientists and engineers with the Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program…
How Do You Break the Internet?

How Do You Break the Internet?

There is a great deal of rhetoric and propaganda about "threats to the Internet" floating around the ethernet these days.  It's mostly political talk, in my opinion.  The majority of people…
Special Yeast Reduce Alcohol, Improve Wine

Special Yeast Reduce Alcohol, Improve Wine

A team of Australian researchers has taken a giant step towards controlling a growing problem in the wine community. They have identified special yeast that produce a lower level of alcohol,…
Soil Production Breaks Geologic Speed Record

Soil Production Breaks Geologic Speed Record

Geologic time is shorthand for slow-paced. But new measurements from steep mountaintops in New Zealand show that rock can transform into soil more than twice as fast as previously believed possible…
Sludge As New Sentinel For Human Health Risks

Sludge As New Sentinel For Human Health Risks

Thousands of chemicals serving a variety of human needs flood into sewage treatment plants once their use life has ended. Many belong to a class of chemicals known as CECs (for chemicals of emerging…