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Our brain, wrinkles on our faces and even mountain chains have one thing in common - all those things, though very different, result from the same process, namely the compression of a 'rigid membrane'. Take a thin sheet of a solid material and try to compress it in such a way that it remains flat. You won't succeed, since the sheet bends systematically along its entire length. This is known as buckling. Now stick the same sheet onto a soft, thick substrate and compress it again in the same way: this time, it forms an extremely regular pattern of small wrinkles characterized by a particular distance between them, called the period.

Most chefs don't know how many calories are in the dishes they prepare.   7 percent were not at all familiar and 49 percent were only somewhat familiar.   Taste is what people pay for at $50 a sitting, not a nanny, yet restaurants could play an important role in helping to reduce the growing obesity epidemic by creating reduced-calorie meals, according to Penn State researchers. 

Many bacteria spend much of their existence within a matrix that they create, called biofilm. Biofilm consists of mucopolysaccharide (or slime-like, think “The Blob” from the 1950s) structures produced by microorganisms as a defense mechanism against their environment. 

Climate science is suffering a crisis of confidence among the public but the data is there - what climate scientists need are effective climate change communication strategies and ways to engage the people on the street who influence policy decisions.

One solution to reducing the environmental footprint of buildings is to create 'living' materials using synthetic biology and cover them with it.  Those materials could eventually produce water in desert environments or harvest sunlight to produce biofuels.Researchers from the University of Greenwich, the University of Southern Denmark, University of Glasgow and University College London are working with an architectural firm and a building materials manufacturer to use protocells - bubbles of oil in an aqueous fluid sensitive to light or different chemicals – to fix carbon from the atmosphere or to create a coral-like skin, which could protect buildings.

The Herschel Space Observatory is the largest telescope in space.   It's capable of detecting longer-wavelength light than the human eye can, light in the far-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the type emitted by galaxies lined up behind other ones in the foreground.The result is that scientists are discovering hundreds of new galaxies through brighter galaxies in front of them that deflect their faint light back to the massive Herschel telescope, an effect identified by Albert Einstein a century ago known as cosmic gravitational lensing.

With the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the toxic mud spill in Hungary, the big question is how long will recovery take?   Unfortunately, yet at least scientifically apt, is that there are previous disasters to help answer those questions.

Researchers say that by applying electrical current to the brain they can enhance mathematical performance for up to 6 months - and there is no impact on other cognitive functions. Aside from being a new way for kids to cheat on their SATs, the work may lead to treatments for the percentage of the population with moderate to severe numerical disabilities like dyscalculia ('math dyslexia') and for those who lose their skill with numbers as a result of stroke or degenerative disease.

Science and technology issues are just too complex, according to results a new survey from North Carolina State University - when it comes to public issues pertaining to science and technology, "talking it out" doesn't seem to work.  The more people discuss the risks and benefits associated with scientific endeavors, the more entrenched they become in their viewpoint and the less likely they are to see the merit of other viewpoints, says Dr. Andrew Binder, an assistant professor of communication at NC State 

Depending on whether or not an invisibility cloak conjures up images of 'Harry Potter' or "Star Trek", we can tell a lot about you your age but as far back as H.G. Wells' turn-of-the-19th-century classic "The Invisible Man" people have been fascinated by the notion of invisibility.

In our many accolades of citizen science, nothing stands taller among discoveries than the strange object Hanny van Arkel found in archived images of the night sky in 2008.After catching sight of it, courtesy of Hanny and Galaxy Zoo, astronomers were determined to learn more about Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's "object" in Dutch).    Now they say they have discovered that  Hanny's Voorwerp represents a 'snapshot in time' that reveals surprising clues about the life cycle of black holes.

Like our own world history, the Universe had its own cycle of events.    After the initial Big Bang (though 'Bang' is a confusing word, it may have been rather dull), there were no light sources in the Universe.