When the Herschel Space Observatory launches on an Ariane-5 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guiana, in July 2008, astronomers will be able to examine some of the coldest objects…

Scientists from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)aboard the research vessel Southern Surveyor returned home today…

It isn't time to rewrite the Corpus Hermeticum just yet but a University of Rochester optical scientist has come close - he has used a tabletop laser to turn pure aluminum gold. And blue. And gray.…

Lt. Col. James "Flipper" Kromberg of the U.S. Air Force became the first military service pilot to evaluate the F-35 Lightning II, taking the aircraft through a series of maneuvers Wednesday on its…

For the first time ever, NASA will beam a song -- The Beatles' "Across the Universe" -- directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4. The transmission over NASA's Deep Space Network will…

You can't pick up a newspaper or a magazine without someone discussing the obesity epidemic. According to the CDC, in 2006, only four states had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. It's no…

Gout, or metabolic arthritis, was considered by Hippocrates “the disease of kings” because only wealthy people with rich diets got it. This was true until the early 20th century when cases went down…

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) evaluates research at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies using the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), a set…

As large, visually-oriented mammals, we have long had a tendency to consider biological diversity primarily in terms of what we can see. There is, however, an entire world of creatures rarely…

The Rocky Mountains have warmed by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The snowpack in the Sierras has dwindled by 20 percent and the temperatures there have heated up by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit. All could lead to…

In the US, most deaths are attributable to chronic afflictions, such as heart disease and cancer. Typically the medical community has attributed these diseases to accumulated damage, such as plaque…

An unusual new species of whirligig beetle from India is being named Orectochilus orbisonorum in honor of the late rock ‘n’ roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara. Arizona State University…

Water has some amazing properties. It is the only natural substance found in all three states — solid, liquid and gas — within the range of natural Earth temperatures. Its solid form is less dense…

In the first study to use imaging technology to see what goes on in the brain when we scratch, researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have uncovered new clues about why…

Tropical forests are immensely species-rich. The question of what causes this diversity is a perennial one in tropical biology. In the 1970s Daniel Janzen and Joseph Connell independently came up…

A new study may explain why women with a mutation in the BRCA1 gene face up to an 85 percent lifetime risk of breast cancer; researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center…

Political party affiliation has little bearing on the number of “green” actions people take, a new study by Porter Novelli and George Mason University shows. According to the survey of more than 11…

Traditional ecosystems in which communities of plants and animals have co-evolved and are interdependent are increasingly rare, due to human-induced ecosystem changes. As a result, historical…

Most of the Earth’s listed active volcanoes are located at the borders between two tectonic plates, where upsurge of magma from the mantle is facilitated. When these magmatic uprisings occur at a…

Only 4% of the universe is made of known material - the other 96% is traditionally labelled into two sectors, dark matter and dark energy. Dr HongSheng Zhao at the University of St Andrews believes…