While the ability of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to become any type of mature cell, from neuron to heart to skin and bone, is indisputably crucial to human development, no less important is…

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…

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,…

The families of some very severely brain injured patients believe that once all treatment options are exhausted, allowing their relatives to die with the help of terminal sedation would be a humane…

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…

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…

A derided 1990s hypothesis of consciousness may have gotten new life, according to a review in Physics of Life Reviews, which claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale…

A new paper claims that traditional Chinese herbal medicines might slow the progression of diabetes - by slowing the more vague condition referred to as "prediabetes." Prediabetes is considered to…

This is a key finding from an international multi-model analysis by the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum (EMF28) and comes at a crucial time, as the European Commission is set to announce next week its…

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…

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…

Those free-swimming jellyfish in the sea don't start out in that familiar medusa form, but rather start as sessile and asexual polyps. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current…

BOSTON - A group of international researchers, led by a research fellow in the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, published a paper today in Cell…

Lincoln, Neb., Jan. 16, 2014 -- Ask most workers if they've ever had a narcissist for a boss and you'll hear stories of leaders who have taken credit for others' work, made decisions without…

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…

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,…

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.…

A new study by a team of KU Leuven and international researchers has found that the chemical structure of queen pheromones in wasps, ants and some bees is strikingly similar, even though these…

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…

From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes – and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. That's about 40 percent…