Researchers studying populations of numerous moth and butterfly species across Papua New Guinea have developed a new technique to study the spread and diet of insect pests--DNA barcoding, which…

Sonic hedgehog, a gene that plays a crucial rule in the positioning and growth of limbs, fingers and toes, has been found in the ectoderm - the cell layer that gives rise to the skin - in the embryos…

Writing in the latest issue of JAMA, Alec B. O'Connor, associate professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, says the federal guidelines governing the approval of potential new drugs…

Using data from two recent national surveys, University of Toronto sociologist Scott Schieman has found that most Americans believe God is concerned with their well-being and is directly involved in…

Traditionally, scientists believed that nicotine inhaled in a puff of cigarette smoke took a mere seven seconds to be taken up by the brain, but new evidence indicates that nicotine takes much longer…

Natural Killer (NK) cells ensnare dangerous cells, such as tumour cells and those infected with bacteria and viruses that are on the run with a bungee-like nanotube, according to research published…

A team of astronomers writing in Astrophysical Journal Letters has shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes, making HM Cancri the binary star…

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have discovered that exposure during pregnancy to Bisphenol A (BPA), a common component of plastics, causes permanent abnormalities in the uterus of offspring,…

Scientists from the U.S. department of Agriculture have discovered how The Aedes aegypti mosquito detects the chemical structure of a compound called octenol as one way to find a mammalian host for a…

In the past week or two, there have been several news stories and blogs (including here on SB) written in regards to a paper that came out this month titled, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More…

The jokes just write themselves, really. But poor sanitation is no laughing matter, especially if you're one of the 2.6 billion people on Earth without access to a toilet. And for pennies on the…

The CDF collaboration, which runs one of the two proton-antiproton collider experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory since the early eighties, has published hundreds of scienticif…

There are 5 specific groups working on biofuel and all with different meanings and purposes and ends. First group is people like me who started working on biofuel when Professor Melvin Calvin found…

Imagine a child, standing in a school cafeteria. We'll assume that this child has reached or surpassed the age of reason (7 years old, for non-Catholics out there), meaning they can understand their…

Do scientists hate scientists who talk to the public? From an old piece by Jared Diamond: Later that day, during a group discussion about the importance of communicating science to the public, I…

A team of Georgia Institute of Technology scientists are reporting that molecules they term "unselfish" may have midwifed the birth of life's original (sometimes called "selfish") genes. The Georgia…

If you want to have staying power on the Internet, you need to have turnover, says a new analysis published in the Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Not…

All At Sea Over Iceberg Science At the opening of the 20th century, British maritime safety was a matter for the Board Of Trade.  This was the era of cork lifejackets.  The consensus of…

A new study that was just released on Sunday and published online in Nature Neuroscience has found that Ritalin, a popular medication to treat ADD/HD, helps improve learning not only by improving…

ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This…