You went to a wedding yesterday. The service was beautiful, the food and drink flowed and there was dancing all night. But people tell you that you are in hospital, that you have been in hospital for…

The world's first optical pacemaker is described in an article published today in Optics Express. A team of scientists at Osaka University in Japan show that powerful, but very short, laser pulses…

How do you distinguish a male fly from a female fly? Apparently even flies have problems with this one sometimes, and an interesting paper in PNAS describes a recently evolved gene in fruit flies…

Analysis of DNA from the remains of ancient humans provides valuable insights into such important questions as the origin of genetic diseases, migration patterns of our forefathers and tribal and…

New research into gigantic flying reptiles has found that they weren’t all gull-like predators grabbing fish from the water but that some were strongly adapted for life on the ground. Pterosaurs…

I am sure that most readers are familiar with programs like the Nobel Prize winning Doctors Without Borders (i.e., Médecins Sans Frontières) and its spin-offs. Now the New York Academy of Sciences…

As fossil fuel emissions continue to climb, reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth would definitely have a cooling effect on surface temperatures. The reduction in sunlight can be…

Eta Carinae has the shape of a 'little man' and surrounds a star doomed to explode within the next 100 000 years. Being brighter than one million Suns, Eta Carinae is the most luminous star known in…

While estrogen is typically thought of as a "female" hormone, men produce it as well. Researchers say they have pinpointed estrogen as a key player in about half of all prostate cancers. The…

Humor- Comics are supposed to be fun, light reading. Something I read on MSNBC’s Comics & Games website has been on my mind for a few months. The column titled "News of the Weird" by Chuck…

Planting biofuel crops on converted forestlands or other ecologically valuable lands has already become a hotly debated practice. Now, a new report co-authored by Nature Conservancy scientists says…

The best places to get accurate data about the world's ice shelves are not exactly the safest. Using satellites is not an accurate solution. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and…

More than 34 percent of American adults — about 72 million people — are obese or overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists once hoped leptin, a hormone that…

Clouds have typically posed a problem to scientists using satellites to observe the lowest part of the atmosphere because they block the satellite's ability to capture a clear, unobstructed view of…

ESO's VLT has allowed astronomers to determine that WOH G64, a red supergiant star almost 2,000 times as large as our Sun located 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, weighs almost…

In 2001, the DNA sequence was published of a combination of persons. The DNA sequences of Jim Watson, discoverer of the DNA’s double helix structure, followed in 2007, and later the DNA of gene…

When patches of red, flaky and itchy skin on newborn mice led rapidly to their deaths, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis looked for the reason why. What they found…

There was no significant increase in the prevalence of obese children and teens in the U.S. between 1999 and 2006, in contrast to the increase that had been reported in prior years, according to a…

Poor blood vessel function is recognized as an early stage indicator of cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis. For more than 20 million Americans living with diabetes, these vascular…

Scientists of the University of Almeria are developing a new system to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions using microalgae photosynthetic activity. This project, called CENIT CO2, is being developed…