In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole the show in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's 1940 Fantasia film.
Though he is glorified by modern science advocates, Galileo was wrong about a lot of things - for example, when his calculation that the tides only happened once a day and was at the same time was criticized, he launched into vitriolic attacks on both Kepler and math, though they both were clearly right and Galileo was clearly wrong, as every illiterate sailor knew.
For $27 Galileo could have been shown the errors of his ways. That is what Rachel MacTavish, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Georgia Southern University, spent on buckets from a hardware store, aquarium tubing, and pumps in order to be able to replicate the tide.
The "Cambrian explosion," the rapid diversification of animal life in the fossil record 530 million years ago, has by necessity remained the subjective of speculation. We know it happened, but no idea why, we simply know we wouldn't be here without it.
Last week, the Obama administration stated that it will fine over 2,600 hospitals because too many Medicare patients treated at those hospitals end up back in the hospital within 30 days of going home.
Over 200,000 doctors have said they will no longer participate in the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare - because of high costs, low payouts, and Byzantine mazes of paperwork, so it seems bad to be driving hospitals away from the programs also - the ones affected primarily treat poor and minority patients.
The administration added two new conditions in this round of penalties: elective hip and knee replacement and chronic lung disease.
Resveratrol has long been touted in news outlets and health blogs as a 2000s miracle product, with little evidence it helps people. It instead benefited from a kind of 'Glaxo would not paid $720 million if it didn't work' veneer.
One of the claims is that it should be used as a complement to exercise and to enhance performance but it not only may not enhance the effects of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), it may hurt it.
Cell division is central to life and the last stage, when two daughter cells split from each other, has fascinated scientists since the dawn of cellular biology.
The name given to this process by those early biologists, cytokinesis, translates as "cell movement" and captures the sense of a highly active and organized series of events. Studying the final step, when the dividing cell creates a furrow before cleaving in two, has been difficult. How does the cell signal where the furrow should be?
Though young people are pleased that the federal government has declared they are not actually adults until age 26 when it comes to having to pay bills, adults who remember being teenagers know that teens don't actually buy into that - they feel mature, especially when it comes to things they want to do.
It is no surprise that young people favor more liberal marijuana laws. In 2014, marijuana is just as cool as smoking cigarettes was in 1954. And like in 1954, proponents gloss over the obvious health risks while governments insist they should get the tax revenue because people will do it anyway.
More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting, a strange deer with vampire-like fangs is roaming the rugged forested slopes of northeast Afghanistan, according to a research team which confirmed the species presence during recent surveys.
Most modern cryptographic schemes rely on complexity for security - they can be cracked, but that would take a prohibitively long time, even with enormous computational resources.
Information-theoretic security, in which even an adversary with unbounded computational power could extract no useful information from an encrypted message, is far too complicated to be practical. With the current White House administration engaged in an unprecedented level of domestic spying, there is a great deal of interest in privacy even the government can't crack.
To gain followers on Twitter, some supposed social media and SEO "experts" claim that a lot of volume and following a lot of people is the road to popularity.
Not really. The most effective strategy is to already be famous. Due to its imbalanced structure, Stephen Hawking is going to get more followers than you because he is already famous. Once a person with a lot of followers notifies the public he is on Twitter, it takes off much faster than if his social media intern followed 100 people with a few dozen followers. Less popular users can compensate for this by increasing their activity and their tweets but the outcome is costly and inefficient.
If you see a bat zooming toward you this evening, cover your hair. But if you do get bit, you will probably not the flu.Halloween bats can be a little scary knowing they are not going to spread most viruses. A research project finds that influenza viruses carried by bats pose a low risk to humans.
Fantasizing about sex with two women is common but fantasizing about being urinated on - called a golden shower - is not.
That's just one of the findings from a research project on sexual deviation undertaken by scholars at Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal.
Deviant sexual fantasies are addressed in numerous speculations and conjectures by psychologists but atypical fantasies (paraphilias) are so subjective they aren't really defined. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) refers to "anomalous" fantasies, while the World Health Organization talks about "unusual" fantasies in defining paraphilias.
More than 20 million US adults have chronic kidney disease but a new study found that a Mediterranean-style diet may significantly reduce the risk of developing it.
Every one-point increase in a Mediterranean diet score was associated with a 17% decreased likelihood of developing chronic kidney disease and dietary patterns that closely resembled the Mediterranean diet were linked with a 50% reduced risk of developing chronic kidney disease and a 42% reduced risk of experiencing rapid kidney function decline.
