Yahoo! Buzz, a competitor to social news sites like Digg and Reddit, has been opened up to the entire worldwide community. We've been critical at times of sites like Digg, which are overrun by…

Scientific happenings, big and small, on this day in history But first, today’s quiz: What famous inventor, born on this day in 1871, will forever be famous for something he did for only 12 seconds?…

Fluoridation was adopted more by politicking than by science according to Edward Groth III, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, with Consumers Union, publishers of the popular Consumers Reports magazine. In a…

Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses inspired by novel…

Alcohol use during the teen years can not only lead to alcoholism, risky sexual behavior and early childbearing, alcohol dependence (AD) has now also been linked to delayed reproduction.…

A group of University of Oklahoma researchers studying the environmental fate of petroleum spills have in the process isolated a community of microorganisms capable of converting hydrocarbons into…

As Dr. Ronaldo Luna, associate professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, watches a machine shake silt from the Mississippi…

Many of us remember that first day of kindergarten or a trip we took as a toddler but new research shows that the human brain, while able to accurately recall trivial details from the past, can also…

According to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau data, there are approximately 20 million children below the age of five in the United States, the age range of greatest susceptibility to the harmful affects of…

With oil prices skyrocketing, the search is on for efficient and sustainable biofuels. Research published this month in Agronomy Journal examines one biofuel crop idea, the corn stover made up of the…

Scientists and consumers have known for years that grapefruit juice can increase the absorption of certain drugs — with the potential for turning normal doses into toxic overdoses. Now, the…

People with epilepsy appear to have a much higher risk of drowning compared to people without epilepsy, according to a study published in the August 19, 2008, issue of Neurology. Previous studies…

Sugar-frosting isn’t just for livening up corn flakes; it can also preserve important therapeutic proteins. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a…

A $2500 bottle of Château Latour wine that scored a 98 on the Wine Spectator point scale is not for amateurs. The sobering business of the high end wine trade involves scientists on a variety of…

Scientists have determined that Neandertals had big mouths that they were able to open unusually wide. No great surprise given their large craniums and strong facial musculature, but what is…

As I was sitting patiently in Long Beach waiting to exit the plane and listening to that weird sawing sound that I hear every time I fly on an Airbus A320, I was wondering two things: 1) Why does it…

Fast memory chips such as DRAMs and SRAMs (Dynamic and Static Random Access Memory) commonly used today have one decisive disadvantage: in case of power interruption, they lose their stored…

Self-recognition, it has been argued, is a hallmark of advanced cognitive abilities in animals. It was previously thought that only the usual suspects of higher cognition—some great apes, dolphins,…

New research, reported this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, contaminated the…

Cells obtained from menstrual blood, termed 'endometrial regenerative cells' (ERCs), are capable of restoring blood flow in an animal model of advanced peripheral artery disease, according to a study…