The country of France recently sided with environmental donors and mandated that new buildings must have solar panels or plants on the roof. Though the science is unclear, the belief is that this will naturally cool buildings or, in the case of planets, retain rainwater, reduce problems with runoffs and favor biodiversity.

Since environmentalists also once insisted that coral reefs should be built from tires, and that ending up costing 100X as much as it saved, politicians only agreed to partial coverings and only on new buildings in commercial zones. Time will tell if the plan is helping or if it is just a political placebo, like biofuels and wind energy.

A Northwestern University-led study in the emerging field of nanocytology could one day help men make better decisions about whether or not to undergo aggressive prostate cancer treatments.

Technology developed by Northwestern University researchers may help solve that quandary by allowing physicians to identify which nascent cancers are likely to escalate into potentially life-threatening malignancies and which ones will remain "indolent," or non-aggressive.

The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test was once the recommended screening tool for detecting prostate cancer, but there is now disagreement over the use of this test because it can't predict which men with elevated PSA levels will actually develop an aggressive form of the disease.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects approximately two percent of the population.

Despite extensive research and breakthroughs, one-third of patients are resistant to currently available therapies. A team of researchers as discovered a new cause to explain the development of temporal lobe epilepsy and may lead to future treatments: At an early stage, astrocytes are uncoupled from each other. 

This results in the extracellular accumulation of potassium ions and neurotransmitters, which cause hyperexcitability of the neurons.

 Most people don't realize that light can take different shapes. In the fundamental mode, light energy is most intense at the center and gradually fades towards the edge of the beam.

Light also has higher order modes. For example, the energy pattern can look like a donut, with most of the energy contained in a ring, and none in the hole or middle. Scientists create higher order modes by shining light through crystals and in recent years passing light along optical microfibers or nanofibers to manipulate particles has gained popularity in research labs because it could some day have applications in physics and biology. 

One canyon on Earth has two mouths - but that is not the only mystery.

First formally documented by western explorers mapping the Colorado Territory in the 1800s, Unaweep Canyon is a puzzling landscape and so it has inspired numerous scientific hypotheses for its origin. A new paper published in Geosphere by Gerilyn S. Soreghan and colleagues brings together old and new geologic data of this region to further the hypothesis that Unaweep Canyon was formed in multiple stages.

80 percent of patients survive when kidney cancer is detected early - but it is often not easy. However, finding it early has been among the disease's greatest challenges.

Kidney cancer is the seventh most common cancer in men and the 10th most common in women, affecting about 65,000 people each year in the United States. About 14,000 patients die of the disease annually. Like most cancers, kidney tumors are easier to treat when diagnosed early. But symptoms of the disease, such as blood in the urine and abdominal pain, often don't develop until later, making early diagnosis difficult.