In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate,...
Astronomy & Space
A University of Utah survey of judges in 19 states found that if a convicted criminal is a psychopath, judges consider it an aggravating factor in sentencing, but if judges also hear biological explanations for the disorder, they reduce the sentence...
Psychology & Sociology
A series of forest searches by dogs specially trained to sniff out northern spotted owl pellets -- the undigested bones, fur and other bits regurgitated by owls -- improved the probability of finding the owls by nearly 30 percent over a series of...
Biology & Nature
Scientists using the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) spectrometer aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have made the first spectroscopic observations of the noble gas helium in the tenuous atmosphere surrounding the Moon. These remote...
Astronomy & Space
Working with a national team of researchers, a scientist from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute has shown for the first time a link between low levels of a specific hormone and increased risk of metabolic disease in humans. The...
Health & Medicine
A professor at Michigan State University is part of a team developing a new method of removing phosphorus from wastewater -- a problem seriously affecting lakes and streams across the United States. In addition, Steven Safferman, an associate...
Earth & Climate
Melting over the Greenland ice sheet shattered the seasonal record on August 8 -- a full four weeks before the close of the melting season, reports Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York...
Earth & Climate
When a carnivore becomes extinct, other predatory species could soon follow, according to new research. Scientists have previously put forward this theory, but a University of Exeter team has now carried out the first experiment to prove it....
Biology & Nature
High above the clouds during thunderstorms, some 50 miles above Earth a different kind of lightning dances. Bursts of red and blue light, known as "sprites," flash for a scant one thousandth of a second. They are often only visible to...
Astronomy & Space
Earthquakes are among the most destructive and common of geologic phenomena. Several million earthquakes are estimated to occur worldwide each year (the vast majority are too small to feel, but their motions can be measured by arrays of seismometers...
Earth & Climate
Soil microbes are impulsive. So much so that they help plants face the challenges of a rapidly changing climate. Jen Lau and Jay Lennon, Michigan State University biologists studied how plants and microbes work together to help plants survive the...
Biology & Nature
Young virgin female hide beetles (Dermestes maculatus) are attracted to cadavers by a combination of cadaver odour and male sex pheromones, finds a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers in Zoology. Neither cadaver...
Biology & Nature
With new national anti-bullying ads urging parents to teach their kids to speak up if they witness bullying, one researcher has found that in humans' evolutionary past at least, helping the victim of a bully hastened our species' movement toward a...
Psychology & Sociology
On July 23, 2012, a massive cloud of solar material erupted off the sun's right side, zooming out into space, passing one of NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft along the way. Using the STEREO data, scientists at NASA'...
Astronomy & Space
Clemson researchers are taking common materials to uncommon places by transforming easily obtainable and affordable materials into fiber. Their findings are published in Nature Photonics. "We have used a highly purified version of beach sand (...
Physics & Chemistry
Researchers for the first time have shown that members of a family of enzymes known as cathepsins -- which are implicated in many disease processes -- may attack one another instead of the bodily proteins they normally degrade. Dubbed "...
Health & Medicine
Major depression or chronic stress can cause the loss of brain volume, a condition that contributes to both emotional and cognitive impairment. Now a team of researchers led by Yale scientists has discovered one reason why this occurs -- a single...
Health & Medicine
A team of researchers at Columbia Engineering, led by Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics Associate Professor Latha Venkataraman and in collaboration with Mark Hybertsen from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at the U.S. Department of...
Physics & Chemistry
The propagation of every animal on the planet is the result of sexual activity between males and females of a given species. But how did things get this way? Why two sexes instead of one? Why are sperm necessary for reproduction and how did they...
Biology & Nature
Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have identified a new stem cell population that may be responsible for giving birth to the neurons responsible for higher thinking. The finding also paves the way for scientists to produce these neurons...
Biology & Nature
NASA scientist Tom Hanisco is helping to fill a big gap in scientists' understanding of how much urban pollution -- and more precisely formaldehyde -- ultimately winds up in Earth's upper atmosphere where it can wreak havoc on Earth's protective...
Astronomy & Space
Magnetic monopoles, entities with isolated north or south magnetic poles, weren't supposed to exist. If you try to saw a bar magnet in half, all you succeed in getting are two magnets, each with a south and north pole. In recent years, however, the...
Physics & Chemistry
During the Neolithic Age (approximately 10000-6000 BCE), early man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and agriculturalist, living in larger, permanent settlements with a variety of domesticated animals and plant life. This transition brought...
Paleontology & Archaeology
The family of small insectivores, Talpidae, includes the moles, shrew moles, and aquatic desmans. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal EvoDevo has found that the enlargement of moles' digging front paws, compared to their...
Biology & Nature
Innovative problem solving requires trying many different solutions. That's true for humans, and now Michigan State University researchers show that it's true for hyenas, too. The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal...
Biology & Nature
DNA holds the genetic code for all sorts of biological molecules and traits. But University of Illinois researchers have found that DNA's code can similarly shape metallic structures. The team found that DNA segments can direct the shape of gold...
Physics & Chemistry
Research has revealed that the extremely hot, dry and windy conditions on Black Saturday in the Australian state of Victoria combined with structures in the atmosphere called 'horizontal convective rolls' -- similar to streamers of wind flowing...
Earth & Climate
A new way to study the role of a critical neurotransmitter in disorders such as epilepsy, anxiety, insomnia, depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol addiction has been developed by a group of scientists led by Gong Chen, an associate professor of...
Biology & Nature
The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III's four surveys, provides spectra...
Astronomy & Space
The 14 years of wildlife studies in and around Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park by Sarah Karpanty, associate professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources and Environment, and her students are summarily part...
Earth & Climate
What a University of Central Florida student thought was a failed experiment has led to a serendipitous discovery hailed by some scientists as a potential game changer for the mass production of nanoparticles. Soroush Shabahang, a graduate student...
Physics & Chemistry
Bioengineered replacements for tendons, ligaments, the meniscus of the knee, and other tissues require re-creation of the exquisite architecture of these tissues in three dimensions. These fibrous, collagen-based tissues located throughout the body...
Physics & Chemistry
California's hydropower is vulnerable to climate change, a University of California, Riverside scientist has advised policymakers in "Our Changing Climate," a report released July 31 by the California Natural Resources Agency and the...
Earth & Climate
Paris is one of those cities that has a look all its own, something that goes beyond landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris have developed visual...
Mathematics & Economics
The American paddlefish -- known for its bizarre, protruding snout and eggs harvested for caviar -- duplicated its entire genome about 42 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. This finding...
Biology & Nature
Just as differences in song can be used to distinguish one bird species from another, the pips and squeaks bats use to find prey can be used to identify different species of bat. Now, for the first time, ecologists have developed a Europe-wide tool...
Biology & Nature
Two new studies offer insight into sex chromosome evolution by focusing on papaya, a multimillion dollar crop plant with a sexual problem (as far as growers are concerned) and a complicated past. The findings are described in two papers in the...
Biology & Nature
The first controlled studies of extremely hot, dense matter have overthrown the widely accepted 50-year-old model used to explain how ions influence each other's behavior in a dense plasma. The results should benefit a wide range of fields, from...
Physics & Chemistry
By some estimates, a third of the Earth's organisms by mass live in our planet's rocks and sediments, yet their lives and ecology are almost a complete mystery. This week, microbiologist James Holden at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and...
Earth & Climate
Microbes, sponges, and worms -- the side effects of pollution and heavy fishing -- are adding insult to injury in Kenya's imperiled reef systems, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Azores. The...
Earth & Climate
By blending optical and atomic force microscope technologies, Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory researchers have found a way to complete 3-D measurements of single biological molecules with unprecedented accuracy and precision. Existing...
Physics & Chemistry
An experiment has shown that strawberry extract added to skin cell cultures acts as a protector against ultraviolet radiation as well as increasing its viability and reducing damage to DNA. Developed by a team of Italian and Spanish researchers, the...
Physics & Chemistry
The rise of the Rocky Mountains and the appearance of a major seaway that divided North America may have boosted the evolution of new dinosaur species, according to a new Ohio University-led study. The finding, published today in the journal PLOS...
Paleontology & Archaeology
Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes...
Astronomy & Space
In science fiction novels, evil overlords and hostile aliens often threaten to vaporize Earth. At the beginning of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the officiously bureaucratic aliens called Vogons, authors of the third-worst poetry in the...
Earth & Climate
The male response to depictions of ideal masculinity in advertising is typically negative, which has implications for advertisers and marketers targeting the increasingly fragmented consumer demographic, according to research from a University of...
Psychology & Sociology
Archaeological sites that currently take years to map will be completed in minutes if tests underway in Peru of a new system being developed at Vanderbilt University go well. The Aurora Flight Sciences unmanned aerial vehicle will be integrated into...
Mathematics & Economics
By identifying a key protein that tells certain breast cancer cells when and how to move, researchers at Michigan State University hope to better understand the process by which breast cancer spreads, or metastasizes. When breast cancer metastasizes...
Health & Medicine
In a curious evolutionary twist, several species of a commonly studied fruit fly appear to have incorporated genetic material from a virus into their genomes, according to new research by University at Buffalo biologists. The study found that...
Biology & Nature
With headlines proclaiming the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the so-called God particle -- particle physics has captured the imagination of the world, particularly among those who dwell on the nature of the cosmos. But this is only one puzzle...
Physics & Chemistry
