A biological process taught to every pupil studying science at high school has just become a little more complicated, thanks to a new discovery published today. Scientists from the University of Bath…

Anxiety gets a lot of bad press. Dwelling on the negative can lead to chronic stress and anxiety disorders and phobias, but evolutionarily speaking, anxiety holds functional value. In humans,…

The Sun has a very dynamic atmosphere, with huge fountains of hot gas erupting in the atmosphere, or corona, every few minutes, travelling at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour and reaching…

Research published in the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters shows how a team from Lancaster and Durham Universities sought a means to prove the correlation between the ionizing…

A daily dose of caffeine blocks the disruptive effects of high cholesterol that scientists have linked to Alzheimer's disease. A study in the Journal of Neuroinflammation revealed that caffeine…

First, I have a disclosure: I had no idea where Masai was before I googled it. It turns out I have never heard of it because it's not a place, it's a tribe. In Kenya and Tanzania. They don't read…

Instead of NASA scrapping the two space shuttles. Why not fly them up to the International Space Station and incorperate them into the station for much needed square footage. Maybe even as an escape…

Heavy water is water (H2O) in which oxygen is bound to atoms of the hydrogen isotope deuterium (2H). Heavy water is so named because it is significantly more dense (>1.1 g/cm3) than ordinary (…

I'm hosting the 102nd edition of The Tangled Bank, a blog carnival dedicated to science medicine and natural history over at Further Thoughts.

In the last 20 years, physicists have, after drilling down into ever smaller particles of matter come to this conclusion, that everything is energy This, to some degree confirms some of the…

DNA repair capacity is an important factor in cancer, inflammation, aging, and other human conditions. Radiation is something we can never avoid and it's responsible for a lot of medical problems.…

Omega Centauri is visible from Earth with the naked eye and is one of the favorite celestial objects for stargazers from the southern hemisphere. Although the cluster is 17,000 light-years away,…

An international team of scientists, led by Prof Louise Harra, University College London, Mullard Space Science Laboratory, have found a source of the stream of particles that make up the slow solar…

Scottish astronomers have found a baby planet still in the stages of forming and encased within a 'womb' of gas. The embryonic planet, thought to be the youngest ever seen, was discovered by Dr Jane…

Scientists have long known that emotions and other personality traits and disorders run together in families but finding which genes are most important in controlling emotions has proven difficult.…

Researchers in a large, multi-institutional study have found one gene variant that is linked to an increased risk of lung cancer. The research team collected DNA from 1,154 smokers who have lung…

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about a Chicago charter school. I was naive enough to believe that if a group of ninth graders could not read it was unique to this Chicago school. Today I read a…

In the first experiment of its kind conducted in nature, a University of British Columbia evolutionary biologist has come up with strong evidence for one of Charles Darwin’s cornerstone ideas –…

Using a new technique, two NASA scientists have identified the lightest known black hole. With a mass only about 3.8 times greater than our Sun and a diameter of only 15 miles, the black hole lies…

DNA, the stuff our genes are made of, is the building material of choice for nanoscale objects. A team led by Günter von Kiedrowski at the Ruhr University in Bochum has now made a dodecahedron (a…