There’s real pressure on the aviation industry to introduce faster, cheaper and greener aircraft, while maintaining the high safety standards demanded of airlines worldwide.

Researchers have made a significant breakthrough in the development of synthetic pathways that will enable renewable biosynthesis of the gas propane. 

Natural metabolic pathways for the renewable biosynthesis of propane do not exist but scientists at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), Imperial College and University of Turku have developed an alternative microbial biosynthetic pathway to produce renewable propane.

In December 2011, when the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Texas Rangers signed away their local television rights for about $3 billion apiece, the sport media heralded a new record for local television rights fees.

Accounting for roughly 43 percent of MLB’s $8 billion haul in 2014, media revenues have made the players rich and the owners even richer.

Today, the idea that a team would ban its games from being broadcast is unthinkable, so ingrained are TV and radio contracts in the marketing and business practices of the sport.

Not all exoplanets are going to be habitable, many will be just the opposite. Astronomers have measured the temperature of the atmosphere of an exoplanet with unequaled precision and determined we won't be vacationing there any time soon. By crossing two approaches, using the HARPS spectrometer and a new way of interpreting sodium lines, researchers have been able to conclude that exoplanet HD 189733b is showing infernal atmospheric conditions, with wind speeds of more than 1,000 kilometers per hour and a temperature 3,000 degrees. 

A common, humble field bug is spreading a disease that has already infected millions of olive trees in Italy.

Olive and citrus fruit crops throughout the Mediterranean are threatened, yet there has been a collective failure to recognize the danger and take decisive action.

Researchers have discovered how nerve cells adjust to low energy environments during the brain's growth process, which may one day help find treatments for nerve cell damage and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Neurons in the brain have extraordinarily high energy demands due to complex dendrites that expand to high volume and surface areas. It is also known that neurons are the first to die from restriction of blood supply to tissues, causing a shortage of oxygen and glucose needed for cellular metabolism.

Human norovirus can cause an immune response in dogs so it leads to obvious concern over whether or not dogs can transmit it to other people.

Norovirus, which causes vomiting and diarrhea, is extremely contagious among humans. It infects 19-21 million Americans annually - more than six percent of the US population - according to the CDC. Those infections may result in as many as 71,000 hospitalizations, and 800 deaths.

A very popular urban myth is that window glass is a liquid.  This apparently originated by the recognition that old European cathedrals had windows with the glass being thicker at the bottom than the top.  The actual cause of this is not attributable to gravity pulling the glass downward in a slump but rather the early window manufacturing techniques followed by a common practice of mounting window glass with the thicker side down. 

How fast the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang is something of a puzzling question. It wasn't that long enough that we didn't know it was accelerating at all, and a new study finds the acceleration of the expansion of the universe might not be as fast as thought.

The currently accepted view of the universe expanding at a faster and faster rate, pulled apart by an unknown force labeled under the umbrella term 'dark energy', is based on observations that resulted in the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics. But observations based on uniform type Ia supernovae - cosmic "beacons" - may actually fall into different populations.

That's like comparing 100-watt light bulbs only to find out they vary in brightness. 

Papain, found naturally in papaya and ioften referred to as a “plant-based pepsin”, is an important industrial protein-degrading enzyme for the food and cosmetic industries. The cosmetic industry uses papain in exfoliating treatments to remove dead surface skin and there even are enzyme-based shampoos for house pets to clean the fur and make it easier to brush. 

But lots of natural things can trigger allergic reactions.