A new paper in Biology Letters raises more questions about the benefits of vitamins as a health supplement.

High doses of dietary antioxidants such as vitamins are claimed to slow the process of cellular aging by lessening the damage to proteins, lipids and DNA caused by free radicals. Some research has found that the longevity of mice could be extended by administering particular vitamin supplements, despite the supplements' limited effectiveness in reducing free radical damage. However, the opposite was found to be true in voles in a new study.

The genetic sequence of the X chromosome, the female counterpart to the male-associated Y chromosome, reveals that large portions of the X have evolved to play a specialized role in sperm production.

Insect limbs can move without muscles – and a new study helps to explain how insects control their movements using a close interplay of neuronal control and 'clever biomechanical tricks', which may provide engineers with new ways to improve the control of robotic and prosthetic limbs.

Their work helps to explain how insects control their movements using a close interplay of neuronal control and 'clever biomechanical tricks,' says lead researcher Dr Tom Matheson, a Reader in Neurobiology at the University of Leicester.

The ancient Romans were the first to officially discovered that rotating crops improves plant nutrition and inhibits the spread of disease.

While it's common wisdom today, science is often about confirming why nature works the way it does. A new paper details profound effect crop rotation has on enriching soil with bacteria, fungi and protozoa. 

Soil was collected from a field near Norwich and planted with wheat, oats and peas. After growing wheat, it remained largely unchanged and the microbes in it were mostly bacteria. However, growing oat and pea in the same sample caused a huge shift towards protozoa and nematode worms. Soil grown with peas was highly enriched for fungi.

Researchers using  ‘metagenomics’,  the open-ended sequencing of DNA from samples without the need for culture or target-specific amplification or enrichment, have recovered tuberculosis (TB) genomes from the lung tissue of a 215-year old mummy using a technique known as metagenomics.

Lots of people who watch the news see when records, some that have stood for a hundred years, are broken in heat waves. But the increase in minimum daily temperatures is telling a more interesting story than maximum ones. Since 1901, nighttime heat waves, when the daily low is in the top 1 percent of the temperatures on record for at least three nights in a row, have quadrupled, according to a new paper.

Researchers found that these nighttime heat waves are becoming more frequent in western Washington and Oregon. It's a good time to stay inside and read this article because, on average, heat waves tend to strike around the last week of July.