A predisposition for obesity might be wired into the brain from the start, suggests a new study of rats in Cell Metabolism. Rats selectively bred to be prone to obesity show abnormalities in a part…

Paleontologists, who use estimates based on the fossil record, and scientists who use "molecular clock" methods to study evolutionary history, have never agreed on when modern birds came into…

Squeeze a crystal of manganese oxide hard enough, and it changes from an electrical insulator to a conductive metal. In a Nature Materials report, researchers use computational modeling to show why…

Manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder, is a psychiatric condition characterized by alternating mania and depression, affecting about one in every hundred people worldwide. Although it is…

Ethylene, the world's most commonly produced organic compound, is used many types of industries. Farmers and horticulturalists use it as a plant hormone to promote flowering and ripening, especially…

The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132 (Hubble picture and video below) belongs to a category of galaxies called giant ellipticals. NGC 1132, together with the small dwarf galaxies surrounding it, are dubbed…

A 'barcode' gene that can be used to distinguish between the majority of plant species on Earth has been identified. This gene, which can be used to identify plants using a small sample, could lead…

Africa and Europe get about 4 mm closer every year in a northeast convergence direction. The exact position and geometry of the boundary between the African and Eurasian plates is unknown, but it is…

A burger and fries may be the quintessential North American meal but it can also be viewed as the perfect example of humanity’s increasingly varied diet, according to researchers who have conducted a…

Optical clocks might become the atomic clocks of the future. Their "pendulum", i.e. the regular oscillation process which each clock needs, is an oscillation in the range of the visible light. As…

A compound that naturally occurs in grapefruit and other citrus fruits may be able to block the secretion of hepatitis C virus (HCV) from infected cells, a process required to maintain chronic…

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll,…

For the first time, scientists have described the transition of the flat, disc-shaped heart field into the primary linear heart tube. The investigations on zebrafish embryos were made by Stefan Rohr…

Yulex Corporation, a Maricopa, Arizona company that develops clean technologies to derive bio-based materials and products including natural latex, rubber and renewable energy sources from the desert…

A new plan to further reduce, refine and replace the use of animals in research and regulatory testing, commonly referred to as the 3Rs, was unveiled today by the Interagency Coordinating Committee…

More than 25 per cent of the world’s adult population are hypertensive, and it has been estimated that this figure will increase to 29 per cent by 2025. In addition, hypertension causes around 50 per…

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed. In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we…

An international team writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) say anthropogenic forcing could push the Earth’s climate system past critical thresholds, so that important…

Aerospace engineers are again looking to natural flyers to create the next generation in airplanes. For example: A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per…

In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women…