The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been colliding protons at record high energy since the summer, but now the time has now come to collide large nuclei (nuclei of lead, Pb, consist of 208 neutrons and protons).

Representatives from more than 190 countries will travel to Paris next week in emissions-belching vehicles to dine on five-course meals and talk about creating a process to reduce greenhouse gases over time.  Then 170 of them will ignore it while the ones with few CO2 emissions will claim they are doing their part. 

An economics paper in Science estimates that the Paris pledges can reduce the probability of the highest levels of warming, and increase the probability of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, if they are implemented and numerical models are accurate. 

Scientists believe they have resolved a decades-long debate about how the brain is modified when an animal learns.

Using newly developed tools for manipulating specific populations of neurons, the researchers have for the first time observed direct evidence of synaptic plasticity -- changes in the strength of connections between neurons -- in the fruit fly brain while flies are learning.

Due to the relative simplicity of fruit fly neural anatomy -- there are just two synapses separating odor-detecting antenna from an olfactory-memory brain center called the mushroom body -- the diminutive insects have provided a powerful model organism for studying learning.

In new research appearing in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology, an international research team led by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem describes a new technique for growing human hepatocytes in the laboratory. This groundbreaking development could help advance a variety of liver-related research and applications, from studying drug toxicity to creating bio-artificial liver support for patients awaiting transplantations.

After a decade of rapid growth in global CO₂ emissions, spurred on by increases in China which offset declines in the US and Europe thanks to natural gas, increases have leveled off: 2012 saw only 0.8%, 2013 was 1.5% and 2014 was 0.5%. Last year, the world's economy continued to grow by 3% overall and even China's unrelenting emissions were held in check.

To some, that means the decoupling of CO₂ emissions from global economic growth. To others, it signals that the developed world has given up on manufacturing. Instead, a country like India can increase its emissions by 7.8% and became the fourth largest emitter globally while claiming the same developing nation status China and Mexico do.

Research led by Dr. Keiji Tanimoto from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, has brought us closer to understanding the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of genomic imprinting. In this intriguing event, one copy of a gene is 'turned off', or silenced, depending on whether it was derived from the mother or the father. The research team has identified a segment of DNA that is essential in the imprinting process for the closely linked Igf2/H19 genes, two of the first imprinted genes to be discovered. If these genes are incorrectly imprinted, it can lead to the overgrowth (Beckwith-Wiedemann) or dwarfism (Silver Russell) syndromes, and also has a role in some kidney and liver cancers.

A robotic bartender has to do something challenging for a machine - ignore data and recognize social signals. Researchers at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) of Bielefeld University investigated how a robotic bartender can better understand human communication and serve drinks like a human would. They invited participants in the lab and asked them to try and be a robotic bartender the researchers call James. The participants saw through the robot's eyes and ears and selected actions from its repertoire. 

Fast Radio Bursts - bursts of energy from space that appear as a short flashes of radio waves to telescopes on Earth - have baffled astronomers since first detected a decade ago.

Though only 16 have been recorded, there could be thousands of of these mysterious events each day.

Matter known as ordinary, which makes up everything we know, corresponds to only 5% of the Universe. Approximately half of this percentage still eluded detection. Numerical simulations made it possible to predict that the rest of this ordinary matter should be located in the large-scale structures that form the 'cosmic web' at temperatures between 100,000 and 10 million degrees. A team led by a researcher from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, observed this phenomenon directly. The research shows that the majority of the missing ordinary matter is found in the form of a very hot gas associated with intergalactic filaments. The article reporting this discovery is published in the journal Nature.

(PHILADELPHIA) -- Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have discovered why conventional efforts to block a tiny strand of ribonucleic acid, called microRNA, in triple negative breast cancer cells failed. In a study published December 2nd in the journal PLOS ONE, the new insight enables effective design of RNA blockers against previously intractable microRNAs.