Insects are astonishingly diverse, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all named animal species living today, and their diversity is widely thought to have increased steadily over evolutionary time. A new study, however, finds that insect diversity actually has not changed much over the past 125 million years.

It's not that no new insects have evolved. Rather, as new insects have evolved, others have gone extinct, leaving the overall diversity relatively unchanged, according to paleontologist Matthew Clapham, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, whose team published the new findings February 3 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Washington, D.C.--January 26, 2016-- Researchers have uncovered potent antimicrobial activity in a natural clay deposit found on the central coast of British Columbia, Canada. The research, published this week in mBio, an online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, shows that the clay can kill members of the ESKAPE group of bacterial pathogens, the culprits behind some of the deadliest and most antibiotic-resistant hospital-acquired infections.

The little penguin species (popularly known as little blue penguins) found in southern New Zealand is a surprisingly recent invader from Australia, according to a new study led by University of Otago researchers.

Following the recent discovery that little penguins in the southern province of Otago belong to an Australian species, a team of researchers from New Zealand and the United States set out to determine when the Aussies first arrived.

The Marsden and Allan Wilson Centre-funded study was carried out by Dr Stefanie Grosser as part of her PhD research, and led by Professor Jon Waters from Otago's Department of Zoology.

A Sino-Italian workshop on Applied Statistics was held today at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova. The organizers were Alessandra Brazzale and Alessandra Salvan from the Department of Statistical Sciences, and Giorgio Picci from the "Confucius Institute". 

ATLANTA (Feb. 1, 2016)--In a study to be presented on Feb. 6 at 8:45 a.m. EST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, in Atlanta, researchers will present findings from a study titled, The NICHD Fetal Growth Studies: Development of a contemporary formula for estimating gestational age from ultrasound fetal biometrics.

An interdisciplinary group of researchers at UC Santa Barbara has taken strides in the development of an underwater adhesive that has the potential for a variety of biomedical and non-biological applications. Areas such as tissue repair, dental adhesives and other surface adhesion applications -- which are often required under adverse conditions, such as salty sea water and in aqueous solutions containing organic impurities -- could benefit from this glue, which replicates the adhesion strategy of the Sandcastle worm (Phragmatopoma californica), a segmented marine invertebrate commonly found along the California coast.

Oklahoma City (February 1, 2016) When the audio on your television set or smart phone is too loud, you simply turn down the volume. What if we could do the same for the signaling in our bodies that essentially causes normal cells to turn cancerous?

New discoveries by researchers at the Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma may point to new ways to do just that.

Hiroshi Y. Yamada, Ph.D., and his team zeroed in on chromosome instability as a potential precursor to colon cancer.

Unless you are seeing a homeopath, or a naturopath or anything else that ends in "path", you probably believe your treatment is evidence-based. 

That may not be true. Hospitals are not under even more pressure to contain costs, but they may need to look at the staff to find out why expenses are high and results don't always match.  Use of evidence-based practice among chief nurses and their hospitals is relatively low, according to a survey led by Bernadette Melnyk, dean of the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University.

And many of the hospitals in the study reported poor scores on key performance measures, such as falls and pressure ulcers.

"We can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts."
--Naomi Oreskes

"There is a tendency among public intellectuals who are entirely reasonable in some areas to descend into the promotion of pseudoscience in others.
--Debunking Denialism, on Oreskes

Monsanto's signature herbicide glyphosate, first marketed as "Roundup," is now the most popular weed-killer in the history of chemical agriculture in both the U.S. and globally, according to a paper in Environmental Sciences Europe written by economist Dr. Chuck Benbrook, a staunch opponent of conventional agriculture.

Unlike 2,4-D, smart strategies have limited weed resistance and unlike DDT, glyphosate has never had a 'Rachel Carson event' which has kept it in use.