Physicists have identified a mechanism that may help explain Zipf's law – a unique pattern of behavior found in disparate systems, including complex biological ones. Their mathematical models…

As the complex story of climate change unfolds, many of the forecasts are grim, but there are exceptions - the lowest-oxygen environments in the ocean would get now get worse, they may improve if…

Oxazepam, a drug that is commonly used to treat insomnia and anxiety in humans, has been shown to reduce mortality rates in fish when it gets into natural water supplies.  For their study,…

Researchers have developed a powerful new tool to identify genetic changes in disease-causing bacteria that are responsible for antibiotic resistance. The team looked at the genome of Streptococcus…

A recent study conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers recommends laparoscopic cholecystectomies (surgical removal of the gallbladder) for pediatric patients suffering from gallstones and other…

Researchers have come step closer to understanding the birth of the sun. A team led by Dr Maria Lugaro and Professor Alexander Heger, from Monash University, have investigated the solar system's…

For years, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have been working on origami robots — reconfigurable machines that can fold themselves into arbitrary shapes. In Science, they report their latest…

When it comes to elephants, the Wildlife Conservation Society does not believe in conservation. Or sustainability. Instead, existing ivory must be destroyed and legal ivory markets need to be…

Throughout the 1990s, biofuels were the environmental rage. Everyone from Vice-President Al Gore to Greenpeace touted them as the replacement for fossil fuels. The future belonged to such renewable…

In California, wildfires happen thousands of times per year, even in non-drought years. They happened long before climate change concerns but not factoring wildfires into simplistic parameter-based…

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is…

A nasal brush test can rapidly and accurately diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Up to now, a definitive CJD diagnosis requires…

Your stress levels may be another thing you can blame on your mother. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could…

Southern California is aghast that cities are now enforcing water usage cutbacks during the ongoing drought - it's because during the mandatory restrictions, while the farming regions of central…

Slippery as an eel may be a popular phrase but it turns out they are a lot easier to catch when marine vessels make noise nearby. In a Global Change Biology paper, researchers from the Universities…

Mutations in a gene named CTR9 gene that helps regulate when genes are switched on and off in cells have been found to cause rare cases of Wilms tumor, the most common kidney cancer occurring in…

Europe is so far ahead of the US in its thinking on antibiotics and antibiotic resistance that we should all be ashamed. For the last 15 years, Europe has led the way on the regulatory front making…

The 21st century will be the century of the 'smart home', where your home and your portable technology all interact seamlessly with one another. In the 21st century, smart homes won't be just…

Juvenile loggerhead turtles don't just passively drift through life, they swim into oncoming ocean currents, according to a new study. After loggerhead turtle hatchlings leave nesting beaches, they…

Lanternsharks produce and perceive bioluminescent light in order to communicate, find prey, and camouflage themselves against predators in the mesopelagic twilight zone. The mesopelagic twilight…