When a feather or a plastic bag or almost anything light is placed in water, these items will generally float.  This is easy to understand if you think of water being more dense than the other item.  If you put something heavier in water, it tends to sink like a rock or a piece of metal but this doesn't fully explain how an iron ship can float. 

Scientists may get frustrated at Dr. Oz and The Food Babe and other people who are against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) while munching happily on organic strains created by mutagenesis, but if we care about cognitive science issues, the evidence-based world might want to be a little kinder to them in the future.

The reason some people don't trust science has evolutionary roots, a group of Belgian scholars believe - science is complex, they say, and when brains were more primitive, the world had to be made as simple as possible. So 'if I can't pronounce it, you should not eat it' may be a relic of our neuroscience past and some people will have that fear in greater amounts than others.

What does it mean when a supermassive black hole exists in a place where it isn't supposed to exist? It's another puzzle of the early universe.

Henize 2-10 is a small irregular galaxy that is not too far away, at least in astronomical terms: 30 million light-years. "This is a dwarf starburst galaxy -- a small galaxy with regions of very rapid star formation -- about 10 percent of the size of our own Milky Way," says Ryan Hickox, an assistant professor in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "If you look at it, it's a blob, but it surprisingly harbors a central black hole."

A recent randomized trial looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation and found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers.

The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment. 
Injury is the leading cause of death among young adults, and uncontrolled hemorrhage is the most important preventable factor among those who sustain traumatic injury.

Much of what we know about cancer and many modern medicines that treat it grow from experiments on cancer cells but it is difficult to maintain the integrity of cell lines due to contamination or simple mistakes such as mislabeling.

Later generations of a cell line may bear no resemblance to the original sample, potentially invalidating results of research performed on mistaken cells. For this reason, the National Cancer Institute maintains a library of 60 authenticated human cancer cell lines for the purposes of research, called the NCI-60.

It’s all very well choosing not to eat genetically modified (GM) food, or even banning it entirely, but what if you then rear your cows on GM soya? Can you really maintain a consistent moral objection?

The Calbuco volcano, a 2,000 meter peak in southern Chile, sent a column of ash about 15 kilometers skywards twice on the night of April 22 and early the following morning. 

As the risk of deadly flows of ash and hot air was immediate, a 20 kilometer radius evacuation zone was declared.

The event was spectacularly visible from Puerto Montt, a city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants, only 30 km away. It seems to have begun within barely five hours of warning signs being first detected by local seismometers.

Researchers have solved a genetic mystery that has afflicted three unrelated families, and possibly others, for generations: The genetic basis for a variety of congenital eye malformations, including the complete absence of eyes. 

We can complain about the cost of American health care but that is the price for doctors caring too much. While in Holland doctors can just unilaterally make the decision to let a patient die, in the United States doctors will continue to recommend tests even when recommendations are that they should be done half as often.

Renewable electricity has nearly trebled under this government.

said Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat energy and climate change minister, during an environment debate held by the Daily Politics show.

Amid the climate of mistrust about claims made by politicians that tends to accompany election campaigns, it is reassuring to report that the evidence supports the minister’s statement.