A collaboration of researchers have experimentally produced Möbius strips from the polarization of light, confirming a theoretical prediction that it is possible for light's electromagnetic field to assume this peculiar shape. Möbius strips are easy to create, of course. Millions of school ...

Spider-Man's breakfasts must be unreal levels of eggs. warriorpoetBy Mark Lorch, University of HullWhile stuck in a hotel room I got sucked into watching the 2002 "Spider-Man" movie. And it struck me that Peter Parker must have an enormously high-protein diet to generate all that spider silk he ...

Wine has gotten more than its share of Miracle Product mainstream media coverage so it's no surprise that beer has been left behind - smooth, balanced beers, the kind of thing that made large brands famous, are out of fashion and now everyone wants hoppy drinks, or something else wildly exaggerated ...

Balloons are common at childrens' birthday parties - we can thank Professor Michael Faraday of The Royal Institution for inventing "caoutchoucs" - but ever since the Montgolfier brothers took their lives in their hands and flew a hot air balloon over Paris in 1783, they have been common in science ...

NWA 7034 - Black Beauty - is a meteorite found a few years ago in the Moroccan desert. Now it has been shown to be a 4.4 billion-year-old chunk of the Martian crust, and according to a new analysis, rocks just like it may cover vast swaths of Mars.In a new paper, scientists report that spectroscopic ...

Electric cars are fine for people who have another car as a back-up or who only make short trips or who are not afraid of a little charge rage in the office parking lot.For everyone else, electric cars only work if they are heavily subsidized. To become mainstream, and not just toys for elites ...

Paleontologists have discovered a new species of a long-necked dinosaur. Qijianglong (pronounced "CHI-jyang-lon") was about 45 feet long and lived about 160 million years ago in the Late Jurassic. The name means "dragon of Qijiang," for its discovery near Qijiang City, close to Chongqing, ...

Arctic sea ice extent plunged 2001 to 2007 but then rebounded between 2007 and 2013. Warming world or not, periods of no change - and rapid change - at the world's northern reaches are the new normal. And perhaps the old normal as well.Natural ups and downs of temperature, wind and other factors ...

Almost 2,500 women of child-bearing age in the United Kingdom are at risk of transmitting mitochondrial disease to their children, evidence of how many families could potentially be helped by new IVF techniques to it.The paper adds data to emotional debates about new regulations.  Mitochondrial ...

Mitochondria produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), commonly called the universal energy currency of the body. The driver for this process is an electrochemical membrane potential, which is created by a series of proton pumps - positive charges and negative ones. These complex, macromolecular machines ...

Scientists may be on the way to genetically modifying plants to naturally protect against pests in new ways. That is good news for people in developing nations and fans of the environment. Older insecticides present environmental and health risks and insects develop resistance to them, complicating ...

Researchers have used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to generate new hair, the first step toward the development of a cell-based treatment for people with hair loss. In the United States alone, more than 40 million men and 21 million women are affected by hair loss. The ...

89 percent of young people in one region of Spain own their first mobile phone before they reach the age of 13 and a recent study has analyzed the use of information and communication technologies by using a sample of 5,538 students from the Vallès Occidental region of Catalonia. The study, based ...

More than 2 million years of life have been saved by solid-organ transplants since 1987, according to a new report in JAMA Surgery. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) maintains a national registry for organ matching. Abbas Rana, M.D., of the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston ...

By Katy Bell, University of Sydney; Alexandra Barratt, University of Sydney, and Andrew Hayen, UNSW AustraliaCancer screening is beneficial when it’s able to prevent people dying from cancer. And it should clearly be adopted where there’s evidence showing this. But using cancer survival rates ...

New studies have found that a supplement of ghrelin - the "appetite hormone" - increased the sexual activity of mice. Ghrelin is a gastrointestinal hormone that is released from the stomach, and is involved in the stimulation of our appetite by activating the brain's reward system. Since the ...

News that will disappoint loads of children:Museum’s ‘Dippy’ dinosaur makes way for blue whaleLondon’s Natural History Museum is re-modelling its entrance, moving out the dinosaur and moving in a blue whale.Also spricht der BBC-Website.  “Dippy” is the affectionate name for the ...

Modern humans date back only about 200,000 years. How did that turn into the population of the planet and the extinction of Neanderthals? We have to leave the world of science to speculate on that but physical evidence does provide some guideposts.Fossil records show that some anatomically modern ...

In 1722, when Europeans arrived on Easter Island, nearly 2,300 miles off the west coast of Chile, the native Polynesian culture known as Rapa Nui were already in a demographic tailspin from which they would not recover. Pick a fad belief of the moment, and someone has correlated it to Easter Island ...

Throughout the 20th century, medical research and public health science was primarily done by corporations - the United States, with 5 percent of the population, generated more than 50 percent of the money and a whole lot more of the science.No more. Medical research has declined in the United ...

In 2013, President Obama threatened to shut down the government if Congress did not do what he wanted. Congress replied in kind and so we got The Sequester, where government functions were halted unless they were specially exempted. NASA and the National Science Foundation were shuttered, the Smithsonian ...

Jean Valentine, a bombe operator at Bletchley in the 1940s. Rui Vieira/PABy Bryony Norburn, University of BuckinghamBletchley Park is a name on everyone’s lips at the moment thanks to the generous coverage stemming from a film that rightly celebrates the role played by men like Alan Turing. But ...

90 percent of the American public consider themselves spiritual so why is there a belief that 'religious' people are less likely to accept science? Environmentalism is certainly akin to its own religion, as is alternative medicine, and they are also widely considered anti-science, yet all three ...

A European consortium is developing an unmanned robot equipped with non-invasive advanced sensors and artificial intelligence systems which will help manage vineyards. The robot will be able to provide reliable, fast and objective information on the state of the vineyards to growers, such as vegetative ...