Some animal-pollinated plants face an interesting dilemma. The same animals they rely on for pollination also like to eat them. This is the case for Nicotiana attenuata, a wild tobacco plant that grows in the American Southwest. The plant is pollinated by the night-active hawkmoth, which after the quib pro quo exchange of pollination for nectar likes to lay its eggs on N. attenuata—eggs that develop into voracious, leaf-eating caterpillars.

Young people are all for saving the environment--as long as doing so makes economic sense, according to new research conducted at Michigan State University.

Based on a survey of 18- to 30-year-olds, researchers from MSU's Eli Broad Graduate School of Management found that young consumers will not pay a premium price for an automobile simply because it is environmentally friendly. Instead, the determining factor – by far – is fuel efficiency.

The findings reveal an eco-savvy generation that has grown up and is coming to grips with the economic reality of paying bills.

Viruses are thought to spread by entering a cell, replicating, and then moving on to infect new cells. But a new study published in Science reveals that some viruses spread much faster than previously thought, and it may be possible to stop the spread of disease by slowing them down.

Using live video microscopy, the scientists discovered that the vaccinia virus was spreading four times more quickly than thought possible, based on the rate at which it replicates. Videos of virus-infected cells revealed that the virus spreads by surfing from cell to cell, using a mechanism that allows it to bounce past cells that are already infected and reach uninfected cells as quickly as possible.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has just released a new image of NGC 6334, an emission nebula discovered by astronomer John Herschel in 1837 and dubbed the Cat's Paw Nebula. 

This new portrait of the Cat's Paw Nebula was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining images taken through blue, green and red filters, as well as a special filter designed to let through the light of glowing hydrogen.

In a new article published in WIREs Congnitive Science, researchers from Duke University and the NIH suggest that the latest cognitive science research has the potential to fundamentally change how the legal system operates.

The team explains that Neurolaw, also known as legal neuroscience, builds upon the research of cognitive, psychological, and social neuroscience by considering the implications for these disciplines within a legal framework. Each of these disciplinary collaborations has been ground-breaking in increasing our knowledge of the way the human brain operates, and now neurolaw continues this trend.

Biologists know that Chaperonins ensure proteins are folded properly to carry out their assigned roles in cells, and according to a new letter published in Nature, they may also know how these molecular chaperones function.

In the new study of archaea (single-celled organisms without nuclei to enclose their genetic information), researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Stanford University in California discovered how the Group II chaperonins close and open folding chambers to initate the folding event and to release the functional protein to the cell.