Ever since Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger simultaneously killed and did not kill his unfortunate cat, fellow scientists have been using quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles.

Up to six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets. Red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy, so that means the closest Earth-like planet could be just 13 light-years away.

Red dwarf stars are smaller, cooler, and fainter than our Sun. An average red dwarf is only one-third as large and one-thousandth as bright as the Sun. From Earth, no red dwarf is visible to the naked eye but we are surrounded by a swarm of red dwarf stars. About 75 percent of the closest stars are red dwarfs, and so, since 6 percent of those should host habitable planets, they arrived at 13 light years as the closest Earth-like planet. 

Bt corn, which is engineered to produce the bacterial toxin, Bt, that organic farmers spray on foods all of the time, is better than a pesticide because is naturally resists attack by the corn rootworm, a pest that feeds on roots and can cause losses of up to $1 billion annually.

It also resulted in an unexpected benefit; the Bt trait has also boosted corn yields. But why?

Celiac disease is not controversial, some people have always had it. But belief that it is on the rise - some claims are that the disease is four times more common today - rather than being diagnosed better, is controversial. And there is confusion created by marketing people who want to increase awareness of their products for dietary fashion reasons. 

But one claim by concerned consumers merited scientific curiosity: that if there was an increase in celiac disease it may be caused by farmers growing strains of wheat that contain more gluten. 

In a new paper,  researchers assess the complete landscape of a cancer's kinome expression and determine which kinases are acting up in a particular tumor.  Since the proteins are relatively easy to target with drugs and plenty of kinase inhibitors already exist, the work shows that those particular kinases can be targeted with drugs and can even lead to potentially combining multiple drugs to target multiple kinases. 

The researchers looked at RNA sequencing data from 482 samples of both cancerous and non-cancerous tissue and identified the most highly expressed kinases in individual breast cancer and pancreatic cancer samples. They found certain common themes.

Messier 106 looks like lots of other galaxies yet it hides a number of secrets. But now, it has slightly fewer than before, thanks to citizen science astronomers.