Special effects in movies have always had a problem: water drops are a consistent size. The one thing that always tips a viewer off in old movies are water drops that look huge next to scaled models.…

On the night of 21 July, ESO astronomer Yuri Beletsky took images of the night sky above Paranal, the 2600m high mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert home to ESO's Very Large Telescope. The amazing…

There are a number of things which can damage DNA - toxic chemicals are the primary concern on earth but, in space, ionized radiation is the worry. Unrepaired DNA can lead to mutations, which in…

The dream of theoretical physics is to unite behind a common theory that explains everything, but that goal has remained highly elusive. String theory emerged 40 years ago as one of the most…

Greenhouse gas emissions from power stations could be cut to almost zero by controlling the combustion process with tiny tubes made from an advanced ceramic material, claim British engineers. The…

Every 62 million years there is a mass extinction on Earth. No one is sure why but, since the solar motion through the Milky Way has been computed for the past 600 million years, we know it is too…

Molly Brown of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and her colleagues have created a model using data from satellite remote sensing of crop growth and food prices. Brown conceived…

On July 3, a NASA aircraft equipped with a state-of-the-art sensor provided emergency response officials with critical soil moisture data for several regions across Texas that were threatened by…

LSI (low-swirl injector) technology, developed by Robert Cheng of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently won a 2007 R&D 100 award from R&D magazine as one of the top 100 new…

If you take a strip of paper, twist one end by 180° and then stick the two ends together to form a ring, the result is called a Möbius strip, a geometric shape with only one surface and one edge. You…

In 2004, Korean investigators announced the creation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, entailing transfer of genetic material from a cell in the…

  Fifteen years ago, when Americans went shopping and came across the  phrase “Made in China” it usually was on small, inexpensive trinkets, toys and souvenirs.  Ten years ago we…

Low-intensity electric fields can disrupt the division of cancer cells and slow the growth of brain tumors, suggest laboratory experiments and a small human trial, raising hopes that electric fields…

An increasing body of evidence indicates that we should reduce the amount of salt in our diet. The American Medical Association (AMA), the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Dietetic…

Monkeys seem to learn the same way humans do, a new research study indicates. “Like humans, monkeys benefit enormously from being actively involved in learning instead of having information presented…

Why do we like some music and not others? Why does music feel right and why does it evoke certain moods? The brain's ability to segment the continual stream of sensory information into perceptual…

Several groups are now developing standards for the voluntary carbon credit market to take some of the chaos and guesswork out of it for us poor consumers. The ones I've looked at look pretty decent,…

In studies with monkeys, researchers have identified in detail the brain regions responsible for the unique ability of primates, including humans, to process visual 3D shapes to guide their…

I have previously commented on how organic chemistry can be incorporated into Second Life. Andrew Lang has created a script to generate 3D structures of molecules and shown how to represent the…

A woman, whose ovaries had failed due to damage caused by chemotherapy and radiotherapy, has received a successful ovarian transplant from her genetically non-identical sister. The transplant…