The Andromeda galaxy is our nearest galactic neighbor in space. Though it is 2.5 million light-years away, its spiral of over 100 billion stars makes it visible as a cigar-shaped smudge of light high in the autumn sky.

But there is also something that takes Hubble to notice - a huge bubble of hot, diffuse plasma surrounding it. If we could see that gargantuan halo from Earth, it would appear to be 100 times the angular diameter of the full Moon. 

The gargantuan halo can be thought of as the "atmosphere" of a galaxy and is estimated to contain half the mass of the stars in the Andromeda galaxy itself. Astronomers were able to identify the halo by measuring how it filtered the light of distant bright background objects called quasars. 

The baseless, superstitious fear of chemicals has certainly gripped our supposedly advanced population in a haze of inchoate panic akin to the residents of 17th century Salem, or Europeans of the Dark Ages.

Most cameras have an auto-stabilization feature to compensate for movement during - and our eyes do also.

But in order for that imperceptible reflex that prevents our vision from blurring when we move to do its job, wirelike projections - axons - of specialized nerve cells must find their way from the retina to the correct part of the brain during embryonic development.

How those axons find their way through the brain's maze of neurons to make the right connection could lead to new ways to treat eye movement disorders. 

Militant animal rights activists have forced Tübingen neuroscientist Professor Nikos Logothetis’ to announce that he will no longer do primate research.

The death threats and hostility he has received are not worth it, he said. But scientists are showing solidarity, even if it just means signing a letter and they won't be getting in the way of any bullets. In less than 48 hours more than 2,000 scientists from all over the world signed a motion by Professor Peter Thier, Chairman of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) at the University of Tübingen.

American Millennials may be even more sexually permissive than the 1970s generation, noted for its bisexuality and drugs and unprotected sex in a consequence-free environment.

Teen sex, premarital sex, gay sex, it's all a lot more commonly accepted than was the case 40 years ago, but Millennials haven't embraced '70s-era Swinger parties: Affairs while married are bad, according to analysis of surveys led by psychologist Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University. 

The epidermis of the coffee bean, known as coffee silverskin, is usually removed after the beans have been dried, and of course used coffee grounds are normally discarded unless people use them in their garden or as an abrasive cleaning product.

It might be time to reconsider putting them in a landfill, according to a study from the University of Granada which set out to see what other value they might have. They found that the antioxidant effects of these coffee grounds are 500 times greater than those found in vitamin C and could be employed to create functional foods with significant health benefits. 


Credit: UGR Divulga

Carbohydrates, commonly known as sugars, are complex biological molecules linked to many fundamental cellular processes in living organisms, so accurate scientific information is important, but new research by scientists at the University of York Structural Biology Laboratory reveals that much of the deposited data on carbohydrate structures may be flawed.

When most people think of Vikings, they think of rape and pillaging and longships full of fierce warriors - history was clearly written by the Normans who conquered England.

The existence of wage gaps between genders in some occupations, from environmentalism to the White House to science academia, continues to be a hot-button topic.

Medium- and lower-wage positions get the most attention but a new paper in The American Journal of Medicine says directors of internal medicine residency programs are also paid different based on gender. And that is despite the increased percentage of women faculty in U.S. academic medicine, and that is regardless of region, program type, academic rank, general internal medicine specialty, age, or years of experience. The gap has not narrowed in the last five years

Young people are just as likely to try electronic cigarettes - vaping - as cigarette smoking, according to a new report  in Tobacco Use in Canada: Patterns and Trends.