Soils may dictate the array of fall colors as much as the trees rooted in them, according to a forest survey out of North Carolina.

By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North Carolina at Charlotte graduate student Emily M. Habinck found that in places where the soil was relatively low in nitrogen and other essential elements, trees produced more red pigments known as anthocyanins.

Habinck's discovery supports a 2003 hypothesis put forward to explain why trees bother to make red pigments, by plant physiologist William Hoch of Montana State University, Bozeman.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurobiological disorder that manifests as a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that is more frequent and severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development.

Approximately 7.8 percent of all school-age children, or about 4.4 million U.S. children aged 4 to 17 years, have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Shire plc announced the results of a phase III trial which demonstrated that adults with ADHD experienced significant improvements in ADHD symptom control within one week of treatment with VYVANSE (lisdexamfetamine dimesylate), the first prodrug stimulant.

For almost 75 years, astronomers have believed that the Universe has a large amount of unseen or ‘dark’ matter, thought to make up about five-sixths of the matter in the cosmos. With the conventional theory of gravitation, based on Newton’s ideas and refined by Einstein 92 years ago, dark matter helps to explain the motion of galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, on the largest scales.

Now two Canadian researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggest that the motion of galaxies in a distant cluster is more easily explained by a Modified Gravity (MOG) theory than by the presence of dark matter.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed high-tech textile yarns that can be used to make clothing glow in the dark, ideal for late-night bicyclists and joggers.

Current high visibility products – such as those used by emergency services and highway maintenance workers – depend on external light sources to make them visible.

They can be ineffective in low light situations and require a light source from something like vehicle headlights to make them visible.

Scientists from the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA) and the University of Cambridge may have discovered an example of a cosmic defect, a remnant from the Big Bang called a texture. If confirmed, their discovery, reported today in Science, will provide dramatic new insight into how the universe evolved following the Big Bang.

Textures are defects in the structure of the vacuum left over from the hot early universe. Professor Neil Turok of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics first showed how textures form in the 1990s, highlighting that some would survive from the Big Bang and should be visible in today’s universe.

For thousands of years, people have used clay to heal wounds, soothe indigestion, and kill intestinal worms. Though the practice has declined in modern times, the recent rise of drug-resistant germs has scientists looking more closely at these ancient remedies to learn exactly what they can do and how they do it.

A French clay that kills several kinds of disease-causing bacteria is at the forefront of new research into age-old, nearly forgotten, but surprisingly potent cures. Among the malevolent bacteria that it has been shown to fight is a "flesh-eating" bug (M.