Polyurethane is a plastic material used as foam for medical applications, like tubes for intravenous catheters, mattresses, as packaging material, as construction foam and much more. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP, for Chemical Technology ICT, for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM and for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT are now exploring new ways to produce this type of plastic sustainably and without the use of materials that can be toxic at high levels.

Everyone says they have impostor syndrome about something, so perhaps many people just mask it and appear confident. Do men mask it better than women? 

If there is an Eye of Sauron in space, ot at least a Marvel villain like Apocalypse, it might look a lot like CW Leonis, roughly 400 light-years away in the constellation Leo.

All proteins in a cell are assembled by complicated molecular machines. The cell nucleus is a kind of vault: It is located in the cell and guards the DNA, which contains the building instructions for all the cell's proteins. When the cell needs a protein for a specific task, it orders a transcript of the matching DNA segment in the nucleus. This copy leaves the nucleus and reaches the ribosomes, complex molecular machines. These then work through the instructions step by step to produce the desired protein.

Did french fries taste better when they were cooked in fat? How about Coca-Cola when it was made with cane sugar or Fritos when they were salty?

People will insist they can tell the difference and they probably can, but sales show that different is not worse. Today, adults are nostalgic about the stuff that older people say is no good.

What about the taste of coffee? It is entirely subjective. Dark roast or light, Arabica or Robusta, you like what you like. What if what you like changes?

A new paper seeks to sound the climate change around using coffee growing conditions. 

A tipping point in climate computer estimates is a threshold where large and perhaps irreversible changes occur. Some estimates are silly, 20 foot ocean rises, etc., but without data from recent times it is hard to make models more reliable. There was a period of high warming nearly 1,100 years ago and in 10,000 B.C. we were still in an ice age, but with only accurate temperature readings for the last 40 years, and formal observation at all only done for the last 150 years, the only way for climate models of the future to be calibrated is to 'predict the past.'