Phoenix Mars Lander as well as knowledge about Mars itself depend on geodesy, in particular planetary geodesy. I will put together a piece on that shortly...

GOTHENBURG, Sweden, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Swedish SEKAB today announced that it is the first company in the world to supply verified sustainable ethanol. This ethanol from Brazilian sugarcane is…

Solar cells provide great opportunities for future large-scale electricity generation. However, there are currently significant limitations, such as the relatively low output of most solar cells…

By adding an enzyme to adult stem cells 'in vitro', remarkable results can be booked 'in vivo', say scientists of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. Up to now, so-called mesenchymal stem…

No, I don't mean the bagel shops. Why do towering scientific geniuses seem to be a thing of the past? There are many potential reasons, but one fascinating aspect of the question is addressed by the…

Gene Genie #32 is up at Highlight Health, showcasing some great blogging on human genes, genetics, and genetic diseases. Go on over and browse some great Sunday Science reading.

We understand in amazing detail how a heart develops - in mice. Whether the same processes that produce mouse heart tissue also generate heart tissue in humans has been unclear, because we obviously…

People love Top 10 lists and a Top 10 list of new species is no exception. We love the idea so much we took the 2007 choices from the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona…

The nomination process for Raytheon's 2008 Math Hero Awards has now opened. These annual awards reward and celebrate teachers and tutors for promoting math achievement to students in a fun and…

With improved resolution, tissue-specific molecular markers and precise timing, a group of scientists say they have possibly overturned a long-standing assumption about the origin of embryonic cells…

By using a specialized microscope that only illuminates the cell’s surface, a virologist and a biophysicist at Rockefeller University have made history by becoming the first to see, in real time and…

Until 1992, when California’s magnitude-7.3 Landers earthquake set off small jolts as far away as Yellowstone National Park, scientists did not believe large earthquakes sparked smaller tremors at…

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars Sunday to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander's…

If education can help attitudes about evolution, we have a lot of educating to do. Maybe it was my Scientific Blogging T-shirt, or my anti-Bush bumper sticker, but something motivated a member of the…

Scientists like order and structure and methodology. Repeatability is even better, though that often requires additional grant funding. It's no different when it comes to weekends, bars and…

Maize, commonly called corn in the US, is the third most important cereal in the world. It has a great number of advantages for molecular agriculture such as its capacity to express recombinant…

When it comes to the original migration to the Islands of Southeast Asia (ISEA - namely, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo), the prevailing theory has been the "out of Taiwan" model -…

Biologists have discovered that a fundamental building block in the cells of flowering plants evolved independently, yet almost identically, on a separate branch of the evolutionary tree--in an…

Another entry in the "I didn't know about this blog, but I am glad I do now" files: Evolutionary Novelties by Todd Oakley from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Go, read it. Before we…

Actually, I have no proof – yet. But an article this month’s issue of Scientific American highlights the myriad therapeutic benefits of blogging, so maybe dashing off a quick article will help with…