Commonly used pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccines do not appear to be effective for preventing pneumonia, found a study by a team of researchers from Switzerland and the United Kingdom writing in…

Astronomers have turned to an unexpected place to study the evolution of planets -- dead stars.  Observations made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal six dead "white dwarf" stars…

Let's face it, with all that talk about life on other planets and dark matter, we lose sight of the big picture.  To start 2009 off right, the Milky Way, our galaxy, wants you to know she is not…

Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomers examined the 5 million-year-old star cluster NGC 2362 with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which can detect the signatures of actively forming planets…

Sometimes studies are done that are common sense but, without them, people would say, about things that are common sense, 'no studies actually show that... so that is why we mention a recent study…

Brown dwarfs, objects that are less massive than stars but larger than planets, just got more elusive, based on a study of 233 nearby multiple-star systems by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble…

Big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures, say…

Iowa State University's Martin Pohl is part of a research team that has developed the first complete map of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms. The map shows the inner part of the Milky Way has two…

The mystery of why ancient South American peoples who created the mysterious Nazca Lines also collected human heads as trophies has long puzzled scholars who theorize the heads may have been used in…

With cold and flu season in full swing, the fact that viruses and bacteria rapidly 'evolve' is apparent with every sneeze, sniffle, and cough. A new report in The FASEB Journal seeks to explain how…

Two posts in one weekend?  I am such a science blogger. But this one doesn't count because it is just an update on some new features we have added in.  Slowly, but surely, we are creating…

Ian Ramjohn recently posted an interesting (but far too short) article on Scientific Blogging titled Competition and Coexistence in which he discussed various theoretical scenarios that could develop…

Brian Swimme is fond of saying, "Four billion years ago, the earth was molten rock and now it sings opera."  In their 1992 book "The Universe Story," Swimme and Thomas Berry attempted to bridge…

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say they have developed a new mouse model of glioblastoma, the most common and deadly brain cancer in humans, that more closely resembles the…

Researchers have developed a new, highly efficient way to pair up cells so they can be fused together into a hybrid cell.   The new technique should make it much easier for scientists to study…

Spirit (Mars Exporation Rover-A, or MER-A), is the first of two rovers which are part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Today marks the 5-year anniversary of Spirit's successful landing on…

While examining patterns of DNA modification in lung cancer, a team of international researchers has discovered what they say is a surprising new mechanism. They say that "silencing" of a single gene…

Variants of numerous DNA repair genes initially appeared to be statistically significantly associated with cancer risk in epidemiological studies. When the data from individual studies are pooled,…

Recent research by Tel Aviv University finds that young blood does a body good when it comes to fighting cancer. The TAU researchers, led by Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu from the Department of…

A team of scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has reported a rapid recovery of coral reefs in areas of Indonesia, following the tsunami that devastated coastal…