Bt corn, which is engineered to produce the bacterial toxin, Bt, that organic farmers spray on foods all of the time, is better than a pesticide because is naturally resists attack by the corn rootworm, a pest that feeds on roots and can cause losses of up to $1 billion annually.

It also resulted in an unexpected benefit; the Bt trait has also boosted corn yields. But why?

Celiac disease is not controversial, some people have always had it. But belief that it is on the rise - some claims are that the disease is four times more common today - rather than being diagnosed better, is controversial. And there is confusion created by marketing people who want to increase awareness of their products for dietary fashion reasons. 

But one claim by concerned consumers merited scientific curiosity: that if there was an increase in celiac disease it may be caused by farmers growing strains of wheat that contain more gluten. 

In a new paper,  researchers assess the complete landscape of a cancer's kinome expression and determine which kinases are acting up in a particular tumor.  Since the proteins are relatively easy to target with drugs and plenty of kinase inhibitors already exist, the work shows that those particular kinases can be targeted with drugs and can even lead to potentially combining multiple drugs to target multiple kinases. 

The researchers looked at RNA sequencing data from 482 samples of both cancerous and non-cancerous tissue and identified the most highly expressed kinases in individual breast cancer and pancreatic cancer samples. They found certain common themes.

Puh! Another big one. Earthquakes of magnitude 8.0 are big to put it mildly. Luckily it happened deeper in the crust than first anticipated and thus the resulting tsunami wasn't as devastating as it very well could have been. While writing this 5 people are reported dead, but I am not so sure about the source of that information (only from news media).

The Solomon islands in the Pacific Ocean are situated right smack on the Ring of Fire - a 'ring' formed by tectonic plates meeting and rubbing up against each other. Along the Ring of Fire there is a lot going on in terms of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions easily spotted on maps with historic data of tectonic activity.

Two Asian charities have joined forces with the U.S. National Funeral Directors' Association (NFDA) to get people to start thinking about deathcare rather than healthcare.

No, deathcare is not another tine in Britain's expanding Liverpool Death Pathway fork, it is a chance to think about the way your final exit is made, assuming you were told you are on the NHS' mandatory road to demise in time to plan. 

Messier 106 looks like lots of other galaxies yet it hides a number of secrets. But now, it has slightly fewer than before, thanks to citizen science astronomers.

Scientists have created single layers of a naturally occurring rare mineral called tungstenite, or WS2, and the resulting sheet of stacked sulfur and tungsten atoms forms a honeycomb pattern of triangles that have been shown to have unusual light-emitting (photoluminescent) properties.

 According to Mauricio Terrones, a professor of physics and of materials science and engineering at Penn State, the triangular structures have potential applications in optical technology; for example, for use in light detectors and lasers. 

You don't see many really old, obese people whereas you see a lot of old thin people. It is reasonable to assume, exceptions aside, that obesity kills. 

Unless you reach a certain age, it has been said. When it comes to seniors, research has reported an "obesity paradox" concluding that, at age 65 and older, having an elevated BMI won't shorten your lifespan, and may even extend it. A new study took another look at the numbers, finding the earlier research flawed. The paradox was a mirage: As obese Americans grow older, in fact, their risk of death climbs.

Most mammals, including humans, see in stereo and hear in stereo but the idea that mammals can also smell in stereo has been suspect.

A new study has found that the common mole (Scalopus aquaticus) relies on stereo sniffing to locate its prey. So there is at least one mammal that can, the researcher concludes.

How, when and where a pathogen is transmitted between two individuals in a population is crucial in understanding and predicting how a disease will spread and a new model seeks to lay the foundation for new zoonotic disease spread thinking

By outlining a predictive model of a spatial epidemic spread in a population of territorial animals and quantifying the instances of transmission events, the research team determined the propagation speed of a pathogen using parameters based on the knowledge of the demography of a species, the way animals wander and the degree of contagiousness of the disease.