The body contains two types of fat cells, white and brown.

White fat serves to store excess calories until they're needed by the body while brown adipocytes actually burn fat by turning it into heat. Ever since it was discovered that adult humans harbor appreciable amounts of brown fat, investigators have been working to better understand its thermogenic fat-burning properties with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapies to combat obesity and diabetes. 

Now, researchers have demonstrated that the transcription factor IRF4 (interferon regulatory factor 4) plays a key role in brown fat's thermogenic process, regulating energy expenditure and cold tolerance.  

Many ancient plants weren't pretty, they didn't taste good, and they weren't big - but they could defend themselves.

As food science progressed, numerous plants were genetically optimized for better flavor and yield, but some lost their ability to produce certain defense chemicals, making them vulnerable to attack by insects and pathogens. Swiss scientists are exploring ways to help protect 21st century maize by re-arming it with its ancestral chemical weapons.  

For hibernating mammals, the pre-winter months are a race to accumulate enough energy reserves to last until spring.

But what about offspring born late in the year? They have less time to store energy. Austrian scientists have discovered that power-napping can help late-born dormice overcome these unfavorable odds.

Taking the street drug Ecstasy could lead to a potentially fatal weakening and rupture of the spinal cord artery, according to a new paper.

Posterior spinal artery aneurysms - a blood-filled swelling of the spinal cord artery, caused by a weakening and distension of the vessel wall - are rare, with only 12 cases reported to date. But all of them caused spinal bleeding which affected the function of the spinal cord.

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Arthur on July 2 at 2:50 PM EDT on July 2nd, it saw a cloud-covered eye as the storm was on the way to becoming a hurricane.  

This visible image of Tropical Storm Arthur was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. Arthur's center was over the Atlantic Ocean and east of Florida's northeast coast.

By 5 AM EDT on July 3, Arthur's eye had formed but remained cloud covered even as the storm hit hurricane-strength with maximum sustained winds near 75 MPH.  

Though strange fads like the blood type diet, going gluten-free or going vegetarian are clearly gimmicks, when your body is in a rut, it helps to change it up a little.

Just like exercise, if you do the same workout every day, its effectiveness will drop - and eating pasta and vegetables all of the time will make it hard to lose weight. But if that is your diet, forget counting calories and just eat meat. Your body will take care of the rest. Don't live the rest of your life that way, that is as crazy as being vegetarian, but for weight loss, it's better to count macronutrients than calories.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was a NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder Project (ESSP) mission designed to make precise, time-dependent global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from an Earth orbiting satellite.

But on February 24, 2009 and it failed to reach orbit.

5 years later, it was time to try again. In 2012, NASA awarded launch services contracts for three United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rockets. And OCO-2 flew on a Boeing Delta II 7320-10C, one of the most successful launch vehicles ever flown with well over 100 successful launches, rather than  on a Taurus XL.

A new study has found that kangaroos, commonly viewed as two-legged hoppers, move with a “pentapedal” gait, planting their tails on the ground in combination with their front and hind legs. 

What’s remarkable is that the tail is anatomically quite different, being made up of more than 20 vertebrae taking on the roles of our feet, calves and thigh bones. “Animals have discovered many uses for their tails,” says professor Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University’s Locomotion Laboratory, “but as far as we know, this is the first use of one as a leg.

Motörhead concert goers may have to sign a waiver before they buy tickets. If that band were in California, they would have to wear a Proposition 65 warning on their shirts.

Why? Because they can give you brain damage, according to a Case Report published in The Lancet. Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian and colleagues from the Hannover Medical School, detail the case of a man who developed a chronic subdural hematoma (bleeding in the brain) after headbanging at a Motörhead concert.

In Switzerland, 7,000 to 8,000 persons each year fall ill with a campylobacter infection, making it the most frequent bacterial disease transmitted through food.