A common black fungus, Aspergillus carbonarius ITEM 5010, found in decaying leaves, soil and rotting fruit has been used to to create hydrocarbons, the chief component of petroleum, similar to those in aviation fuels. The fungus produced the most hydrocarbons on a diet of oatmeal but also created them by eating wheat straw or the non-edible leftovers from corn production.

Fungi have been of interest for about a decade within biofuels production as the key producer of enzymes necessary for converting biomass to sugars. Some researchers showed that fungi could create hydrocarbons, but the research was limited to a specific fungus living within a specific tree in the rainforest, and the actual hydrocarbon concentrations were not reported.

A majority of American adults have tried dieting to lose weight at some point in their lives, and at any given time, about one-third of the adult population say they're currently dieting, which is why diet books are the one consistent think about the New York Times bestseller list. Yet 60 percent of American adults are overweight or even obese and more than 16 percent of deaths nationwide are linked to that. 

There are plenty of misunderstandings and sometimes they get regurgitated into new forms, like that sugar is toxic or bread is bad for your brain. It can get a little confusing so Johns Hopkins physicians have shed some light on what is well-worn myth and what is fiction and what is in between.

Belief: Eating too much sugar can cause diabetes

Scientists have successfully imaged thunder for the first time.

A team from Southwest Research Institute has visually captured the sound waves created by artificially triggered lightning, they reported at a joint meeting of American and Canadian geophysical societies in Montreal.

Although people see it as a flashing bolt, lightning begins as a complex process of electrostatic charges churning around in storm clouds. These charges initiate step leaders, branching veins of electricity propagating down, which subsequently lead to a main discharge channel. That channel opens a path to nearly instantaneous return strokes, which form the lightning flash as we see it.

A new study has created a cause-and-effect link between chronic high blood sugar and disruption of mitochondria, the energy factories that create the metabolic energy that power most of our cells. 

Previous experiments by other research groups had shown that the high blood sugar of untreated diabetes alters the activity of mitochondria, compartments that process nutrients into useable energy for cells. To find out why, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Partha Banerjee compared the enzymes in mitochondria from the hearts of rats with diabetes to those from healthy rat hearts. He looked for differences in levels of two enzymes that add and remove a molecule called O-GlcNAc to proteins.  

A recent and famous image of HL Tau in deep space marks the first time we've seen a forming planetary system, according to a team of astrophysicists who found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in fact made by forming planets.

The image of HL Tau, taken in October 2014 by the state-of-the-art Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile's Atacama Desert, sparked a flurry of scientific debate.

The HL Tau system is less than a million years old, about 17.9 billion kilometres in radius and resides 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.