There's great news for movie lovers.   That popcorn slathered in butter at the movie theater may be only mostly bad for you.

Snack foods like popcorn and many popular breakfast cereals contain "surprisingly large" amounts of healthful antioxidant substances called polyphenols, said chemist Joe Vinson, Ph.D., who headed a new study and presented the results at the ACS meeting today.

Polyphenols are one reason why fruits, vegetables and foods like chocolate, wine, coffee, and tea have become renowned for their potential role in reducing the risk of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. 

After taking a new approach to developing an effective "electronic tongue" that mimics human taste, scientists in Illinois are reporting development of a small, inexpensive, lab-on-a-chip sensor that quickly and accurately identifies sweetness — one of the five primary tastes. It can identify with 100 percent accuracy the full sweep of natural and artificial sweet substances, including 14 common sweeteners, using easy-to-read color markers.

"Devil's claw" is a plant that may hold a natural for arthritis, tendonitis and other illnesses that affect millions each year.

Years of drought in Africa's Kalahari Desert have pushed the Devil's claw toward extinction but scientists are making headway in efforts to produce the valuable medicinal chemicals of the Devil's claw and one group reported an advance at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting. The researchers described the first successful method of producing the active ingredients in Devil's claw — what made it a sensation to natural medicine proponents in Europe.

They say their technique could lead to the development of "biofactories" that produce huge quantities of rare plant extracts quickly and at little cost.

One of the biggest mistakes environmentally conscious people make is thinking that an 'organic' pesticide is somehow superior to an inorganic one.   The word 'organic' may be the most misunderstood word in western Civilization because there is no structural difference in complex, carbon-based molecules whether they were created in a lab or on a tree.

Nature understands exactly what organic means, including what pesticides are designed to do.  Whether or not a small group of people consider them organic is irrelevant - you won't want to eat food treated with Pyrethrin even though it is considered completely 'organic', for example.   

But marketing wins big battles so people want foods produced in more natural ways - enter rosemary, thyme, clove, and mint.

Planetary nebulae are gas and dust shells ejected by stars near the end of their lives - typically seen around stars comparable or smaller in size than the Sun.

The existing population of planetary nebulae is found around small stars comparable in size to our Sun but a new population discovered due to the presence of unusually strong radio sources may be the long predicted class of similar shells around heavier stars.

A team of scientists in Australia and the United States call the new class of object “Super Planetary Nebulae.” They report their work in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The UK Government, in its Digital Britain report in June, made a commitment that every home in the UK should have broadband access by 2012. A range of technologies, including wireless, will be used to deliver the basic broadband.

But the same government and its laws aimed at tackling illegal use of wireless internet connections are making broadband access impossible, according to research published today.

Daithí Mac Síthigh, a lecturer in IT and internet law at the University of East Anglia (UEA), says legislation may not be the most appropriate way to regulate 'wi-fi' sharing, where a network is used by more than one person, and needs clarifying so it does not hold back provision of community wifi schemes.