NASA's Dawn spacecraft is approaching its historic orbit insertion at Ceres, which will happen on Friday, March 6th. Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of agriculture and harvests. Ceres is considered a 'dwarf planet', according to 237 astronomers who outvoted their opposition, as is Pluto now ...

by Marsha Lewis, Inside Science(Inside Science TV) – Scientists often examine matter that is invisible to the naked eye. This hidden atomic world is a mystery for most people, but now a scientist created a way for people to imagine what they might see as their own bodies interact with the ...

By Gabriel Popkin, Inside Science (Inside Science) -- For all the progress physicists have made in figuring out the universe, they still don't know some pretty basic things. Why, for example, do fundamental particles possess the specific values of mass that they have? Presently, physicists ...

A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form can metabolize and reproduce similar to life on Earth.This hypothetical cell membrane, modeled by a team of researchers, is composed of small organic nitrogen compounds and capable of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees below ...

Thorium has its advantages over uranium nuclear power, but is it right for Australia? Credit: dymidziuk.janusz, CC BY-NC-SAAustralia has developed something of an allergic reaction to any mention of uranium or nuclear energy. Blessed as we are with abundant reserves of coal, oil and gas, we have ...

Fossil "swim tracks," a type of vertebrate trace fossil gaining recognition in the field of paleontology, is  made by various tetrapods (four-footed land-living vertebrates) as they traveled through water under buoyant or semibuoyant conditions.They occur in high numbers in deposits from ...

Too cold for a penguin? An Ice Age brought on by global warming so severe penguins had to move?Indeed. During the last interglacial, what is colloquially called an ice age though it has been such non-stop for a few million years, only three populations of emperor penguins may have survived, because ...

Sewage sludge, green waste, even animal excrement can be utilized for energy recovery with  the biobattery modular concept. Biogas plants are an important element for decentralized energy supply. They produce electricity from renewable resources and can compensate for highly fluctuating ...

A partial human skull found in northern Israel  excited paleontologists because it seemed to hold clues about when and where humans and Neanderthals might have interbred. The Manot Cave is a natural limestone formation that had been sealed for 15,000 years. It was discovered by a bulldozer ...

Low birth weight is indicative of various problems and fortunately modern science has made it possible for more low-birth weight babies than ever to thrive, survival is over 94 percent for children born in the third trimester of pregnancy.But low birth weight is being linked to residual effects ...

In 2008, President Obama suggested vaccines might be causing autism. In 2009, during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, there was quickly a vaccine shortage, because the government refused to allow adjuvants, to boost vaccine effectiveness and use less raw material, or multi-dose vials, because they ...

Megaloprepus caerulatus. Credit: Andres Hernandez, STRIBy Jyoti Madhusoodanan, Inside Science(Inside Science) -- In late April, rain begins to pool in the hollows of trees on Barro Colorado Island in Panama. The water-filled tree holes may seem insignificant, but they're prime real estate – and ...

Known for years as the “career woman’s disease” based on the idea that women without children develop disease in their reproductive organs, endometriosis is a painful condition thought to affect one in ten women worldwide.The condition occurs when tissue similar to the lining of the uterus ...

Amyloid, an abnormal protein whose accumulation in the brain is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, starts accumulating inside neurons of people as young as 20, a much younger age than scientists ever imagined, according to a new study based  on brains obtained from the Northwestern University ...

Researchers have found that by changing the selectivity of an enzyme, a small molecule could potentially be used to decrease the likelihood of alcohol-related cancers in an at-risk population. Enzymes are enablers, highly specialized parts of cellular machinery tasked with bringing together molecules ...

A dress that seems to be different colors to different people has all the Internet intrigued - and that's a good thing. It's a good way to understand science and psychology.There are two hypotheses as to why people see dramatically different things; one is that our brains are constantly being bombarded ...

In America, teachers with tenure can't be fired and so it is more important than ever that the best people get the jobs in the first place. Accountability is not going away in the American educational system, and neither are education unions, so new mechanisms for selecting individuals ...

After they die, people are happy to donate their hearts, their eyes, even whole skeletons, without knowing anything at all about what will happen to them.What about genetic information? Under current law, your genetic information is not inherited by default, so a child with a heritable form ...

A 10-year-old boy suffered seizures after over-indulging in licorice sweets and that has led to calls for manufacturers to put a warning on the labels of licorice. After suffering a 2 minute tonic-clonic seizure, a 10-year-old boy was admitted to hospital in Bologna, Italy.  Three ...

In a symposium on social psychology, psychologists are challenging the beliefs of other psychologists about the effectiveness of traditional strategies for encouraging healthy eating.  A paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association observed whether or not photographs of vegetables ...

A new paper believes that a record drought in Syria from 2006-2010 and the 2011 Syrian uprising is not a coincidence. The rebellion was stoked by ongoing man-made climate change, they write.The drought, the worst in modern record-keeping, destroyed agriculture in the breadbasket region ...

Deep in the heart of synthetic biology are the proteins that make it tick and that is why protein engineering is crucial to the new discipline: Scientists grow, harvest, and reprogram proteins to become new drug therapeutics, environmentally friendly fuels, and vaccines. But producing proteins ...

Synthetic cannabinoids ("synthetic marijuana"), with names like Spice, K2, Scooby Doo and hundreds of others, are often sold as a safe, "legal" alternative to marijuana but that is just marketing by drug dealers. Synthetic marijuana was linked to 11,561 reports of poisonings in the United States ...

After an interventional radiology intranasal treatment, migraine patients report using less pain-relief medicine for headaches, according to a paper at the Society of Interventional Radiology's Annual Scientific Meeting. Clinicians used a treatment called image-guided, intranasal sphenopalatine ...