NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has captured more than one thousand discrete sources of gamma rays in its first year, including a measurement that provided experimental evidence about the very structure of space and time, unified as space-time in Einstein's theories.

Your Jack-o'-Lantern may scare away more than just birds - the skin of that pumpkin contains a substance that could put a scare into microbes that cause millions of cases of yeast infections in adults and infants each year, says a new study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Kyung-Soo Hahm, Yoonkyung Park and colleagues note that some disease-causing microbes are becoming resistant to existing antibiotics so scientists worldwide are searching for new antibiotics. Past studies had hinted that pumpkin, long used as folk medicine in some countries, might have antibiotic effects.

Are accident rates higher for people with a particular gene variant?    Bad drivers may, in part,  have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists.

People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it – and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.

The performative and improvisatory aspects of music compares favorably with the temporal, polyphonic aspects of scholarly research,  says University of Illinois professor of education Liora Bresler.

Understanding that could improve both research and education, she says.   Bresler, who studied musicology and was a pianist before becoming an education professor, said that knowing there was an audience to perform for "really intensifies the relationship between the music and the performer." This, she said, is analogous to how a teacher should think of a lecture or a researcher a presentation at a conference.