Though the mechanism responsible for generating part of the skeletal support for the membrane in animal cells is not yet understood, researchers have found a well-defined layer beneath the cell outer membrane forms beyond a certain critical level of stress generated by motor proteins within the cellular system.

A 350-year-old mathematical mystery, that two pendulum clocks mounted together could swing in opposite directions, due to tiny vibrations in the beam caused by both clocks affecting their motions, is a step closing to having a formula derived.

And it could lead to a better understanding of medical conditions like epilepsy or even the behavior of predator-prey systems in the wild, University of Pittsburgh researchers report. 

Since 1996, farmers across the world have planted more than a billion acres of genetically modified corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, called Bt for short. 

Bt proteins, used for decades in sprays by organic farmers, kill some devastating pests but are environmentally friendly and harmless to people. Some scientists have feared that widespread use of these proteins in genetically modified crops would spur rapid evolution of resistance in pests, while opponents predicted Armageddon due to such a biological arms race.

Overprecision, excessive confidence in the accuracy of our knowledge, can have profound consequences in various ways, making people intolerant of dissenting views,  leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis or inflating investors' valuation of their investments.

Overprecision is a common form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments, say business scholars.

A new paper in Psychological Science says that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong.

For a human, knowing the difference between the "charge" of a battery and being charged in a crime is easy. Any three-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken" but for computers those are still daunting tasks.

When a liver from a deceased adult or adolescent donor is split into two separate portions for transplantation, with the smaller portion going to a young child and the larger to an adult, the child will benefit as much if they had received a whole organ from a donor close to their size, according to a paper in Liver Transplantation.