My wife’s cousin, the break-dancing radiologist, broke the microphone clip off my mic stand while singing karaoke on Thanksgiving (my wife and I host Thanksgiving at our house for the family every year). I had another microphone clip and replaced it so we could continue with karaoke, but ...

Uranus and Neptune have a lot in common, climate-wise, even though Uranus is tipped on its side with the pole facing the sun during winter.  They are both home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, they have hurricane-like storms as big as our whole planet and immense ...

Hofstadter's Butterfly, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40 years but had never been directly observed - until now.  Douglas Hofstadter, a physicist and ...

The Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa, the pathfinder radio telescope for the $3 billion global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, has released its first results. KAT-7 is the world's first radio telescope array consisting of composite antenna structures. It is the test array ...

Some people believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a small, unified body composed of the best scientists who make proclamations on lots of things.That isn't really true. The actual IPCC is a tiny UN group, around a dozen people, but the bulk of the data is compiled by unpaid ...

Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago - an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.  20,000 years ago was an ice age but more rigorous understanding of baselines will help researchers develop ...

We all know that the Earth is in constant motion, rotating beneath our feet, but new research in Nature Geoscience reveals that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet and is frequently speeding up and slowing down.Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College ...

Rather than Draconian measures to cut emissions, which will impact people in various regions and economic spheres unfairly, a better solution may be to simply keep places cooler on hot days, which will reduce fuel needed for air conditioning.And outer space can help, Stanford researchers say. They ...

Depending on the species, males have different strategies to try and insure that they reproduce, rather than just being a step-parent. They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, they may have more frequent sex with their long-term partners, they ...

A year after the 2009 human H1N1 pandemic began, researchers detected the H1N1 virus in free-ranging northern elephant seals off the central California coast. It is the first report of that flu strain in any marine mammal.H1N1 originated in pigs. It emerged in humans in 2009, spreading worldwide ...

A new study uses mouse genetics to demonstrate how a handful of workhorse signaling pathways interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body and how crosstalk between two of those pathways - those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) ...

The toxin that causes botulism is the most potent that we know of - just 1/1,000th the weight of a grain of salt can be fatal, which is why so much effort has been put into keeping Clostridium botulinum, which produces the toxin, out of our food. There are seven distinct, but similar, types of ...

The drug candidate J147 was able to reverse memory deficits and improve several aspects of brain function in mice with advanced symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study.   Previous studies have demonstrated that several compounds are able to prevent or delay onset of ...

An anti-cocaine vaccine has been successfully tested in primates, bringing it a step closer to human clinical trials. Cocaine, a tiny molecule drug, works to produce feelings of pleasure because it blocks the recycling of dopamine -- the so-called "pleasure" neurotransmitter -- in two areas of ...

Men who experience sexual harassment are far more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics - purging - in an attempt to control their weight, according to a new psychology paper. The survey was one of the first to examine the effects of sexual harassment on body image ...

Combining Medicare's hospital, physician, and prescription drug coverage with private supplemental coverage into one health plan could save the government and seniors $180 billion over a decade, according to a new analysis from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and advocacy group ...

The Obama Administration released an updated draft proposal that would establish common sense safety standards for hydraulic fracturing on public and Indian lands. Following the release of an initial draft proposal in 2012, the Department of the Interior received over 177,000 public comments that ...

What was the diet and movements of the first New Zealanders like?Isotopes from their bones and teeth can tell us. Researchers say they have been able to identify what is likely to be the first group of people to colonize Marlborough's Wairau Bar, possibly from Polynesia around 700 ...

An analysis of 4,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that recent warming is human-caused.Was there any doubt?The 4,000 abstacts were from papers published in the past 21 years that ...

There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority ...

A group contends that the journal impact factor (JIF), which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has increasingly become an obsession in science. Impact factor of articles is used in evaluating research for funding, hiring ...

In the ongoing struggle between the Representative of the 21st District of Texas, Lamar Smith, and all that is holy about the peer review grant process, the battle lines are getting clearer.Yesterday, it was reported that NSF Director Cora Marrett declined to hand over the peer review comments ...

Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream. More accurate technology and the brighter ...

“Previous studies of slithering have rested on the assumption that snakes slither by pushing laterally against rocks and branches.” explain a joint research team from the Applied Mathematics Laboratory, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, of New York University and the Departments ...