Yesterday, a monster tornado almost 2-miles wide tore through Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, wiping out entire blocks and killing 24 people. The National Weather Service upgraded its calculation of the storm's strength today, declaring it was a rare EF5, the most powerful ranking ...

During the Bush administration, NASA began monitoring the Moon for explosions - they have turned out to be more common than previously believed, happening hundreds of times each year. Smart Science 2.0 readers are already wondering how there can be an 'explosion' when the Moon has no oxygen ...

 By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, researchers have been able to create delicate flower structures -  not at the scale of inches, but microns. These minuscule sculptures don't resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that's ...

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 ...

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 ...

You may not think of private gardens as wildlife refugia, but an increasing body of scientific evidence suggests that these habitats can host a variety of species and act as stepping stones across landscapes that are otherwise dominated by human structures. To increase the effectiveness ...

Decades of focus on genes may have led the scientific community away from a balanced exploration of the organisms that those genes define - whether they be plants, animals or microorganisms - and more toward gene-focused directions: inward, toward the world of cellular and molecular biology, and ...

A new strain of photosynthetic cyanobacteria have been engineered to grow without the need for light.  The cyanobacterium strain Synechococcus elongatus strain PCC 7942 has been well characterized as a model photoautotroph in the lab of Shota Atsumi at the University of California, Davis. ...

Because energy resources in the body must be optimized as much as possible, a new paper says, tasks inherently related to survival, like immune function, take priority. Any leftover energy is then dedicated to reproduction. There is a balance between resource allocation to maintenance and ...

A novel approach to obstructing the runaway inflammatory response implicated in some types of asthma has shown promise in a Phase IIa clinical trial, according to researchers. The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial tested the efficacy and safety of the monoclonal antibody, dupilumab ...

Tiotropium delivered by the Respimat(R) Soft Mist(TM) Inhaler (SMI) increases time to first severe exacerbation and first episode of asthma worsening across a broad spectrum of patients who remain symptomatic despite at least inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) / long-acting beta2-agonists (LABA) therapy ...

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 ...

In Europe, the arrival of the farmers who replaced Mesolithic hunter-gatherers happened in force 9,000 years ago but it was happening elsewhere prior to that. In Syria, there is even evidence of scientific trait selection in grains in 10,000 B.C. but in other parts of the world agriculture came ...

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 are currently a number of research teams worldwide working towards the implementation of bionic heads and faces which can attempt to express human emotions, however “… most of them can not express continuous changing expressions effectively, and they just express limited pre-existing ...

Chemtrails or Acid Rain ? - The Birth Of Two MythsThe idea that acid rain is some sort of hoax or scam is ludicrous. Sulfuric acid and its environmental effects have been known since ancient historical times. If acid rain is a hoax, then the ancient Sumerians and Greeks were certainly in on it ...

In order for research to be most effective, the people included need to be as diverse as possible.  That is why the hundreds of papers each year that are surveys of psychology undergraduates who got extra credit come up with the kind of crazy conclusions mainstream media love to write about ...

Terror networks are comparable in their structure to hierarchical organization in companies and certain online social networks, say the authors of a paper outlining how a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, like a terrorist organization, can work ...