In the mid-1800s an American plant lice made its way to Europe. It wasn't Native Americans returning the disease favor but the sap-sucking aphids still did a number on France, killing the…

There’s a popular YouTube video featuring mathematician Edward Frenkel where he describes how the NSA hacked our emails. It is a backdoor into the National Institute of Standards and Technology…

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality - Carl Sagan I missed the big Carl Sagan thing when it happened. I was in high school when Cosmos came out,…

EVANSTON, Ill. --- There is a lot that 19-month-old children can't do: They can't tie their shoes or get their mittens on the correct hands. But they can use words they do know to learn new ones.…

People with type 2 diabetes have epigenetic changes on their DNA that healthy individuals do not have. This has been shown in a major study by researchers at Lund University. The researchers also…

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts, in collaboration with investigators at the Maastricht University Medical Centre and Maastricht University School of Public…

While instruments an provide an objective measure of earthquake intensity, the intensity of ground motion is often anecdotal. How accurate and reliable are public perceptions? A new study in…

Flocks of birds manage to navigate through difficult environments by individuals having predispositions to favour the left- or right-hand side, according to research published in PLOS Computational…

This news release is available in Portuguese. Our intestines harbour an astronomical number of bacteria, around 100 times the number of cells in our body, known as the gut microbiota. These…

A vast belt of carbon monoxide located at the fringes of the Beta Pictoris system is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles from the star, or nearly three times the distance…

People born unable to see are readily capable of learning to perceive the shape of the human body through soundscapes that translate images into sound, according to a new article in Current Biology.…

Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is…

Female professors are less cooperative than men, which is exactly what we would expect from watching the behavior of men and women in groups. That is the claim recently published in a letter to…

Some recent claims have warned about a link between eating red and processed meat and the risk of developing cancer.  While vegetarians unleashed their confirmation bias in full force, they…

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid,  P/2013 R3, which has fragmented into as many as ten smaller pieces. Although fragile comet nuclei have been…

In the War On Smart Kids Department, tiger mom mentalities may cause ethnic outcasts, say sociologists. Smart Asian kids will be shunned for being too smart? of course not. Instead, the scholars…

This news release is available in German. When we drift into deep slow-wave sleep (SWS), waves of neuronal activity wash across our neocortex. Birds also engage in SWS, but they lack this…

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that uses existing technology to allow researchers and natural resource managers to collect significantly more…

The banana variety Yangambi km5 produces toxic substances that kill the nematode Radopholus similis, a roundworm that infects the root tissue of banana plants – to the frustration of farmers…

This news release is available in German. Scientists in Freiburg may have discovered a fundamental aggravating factor in autoimmune diseases. If B-lymphocytes lack the protein PTP1B, the cells…