Prairie gardens offer Midwestern suburban dwellers an alternative option to the traditional grass lawn. Their combination of native grasses, like tall and wispy bluestem and sideoats, and forbs, such as the colorful yellow and purple coneflowers, are a welcome addition to any lawn.

They also attract beneficial bees and other insects, as well as beautiful butterflies. The prairie plants are native to the Midwest and once established can require fewer resources, such as water, fertilizer, and time to maintain.

Oklahoma is in the news a lot for earthquakes because of activist claims about hydraulic fracturing, the modern process of natural gas extraction.

In reality, the earthquakes may be linked to conventional drilling but the numbers are nothing out of the ordinary - and those are nothing compared to just southern California, which has 30 every day. That's due to the San Andreas Fault system.

Cities that line the fault, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, have been fortunate for the last 100 years - there hasn't been a major destructive earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or more -- but it's coming. Large earthquakes occur at about 150-year intervals on the San Andreas, so the next 'big one' is near.

A team of astronomers have discovered an extremely rare galaxy of gigantic size. The galaxy,  J021659-044920
and located about 9 billion light years away towards the constellation Cetus, emits powerful radio waves and has an end to end extent of a whopping 4 million light years. 

The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals but an atlas based on scientific evidence uses tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years.

The Old World Drought Atlas significantly adds to the historical picture of long-term climate variability over the Northern Hemisphere. In so doing, it should help climate scientists pinpoint causes of drought and extreme rainfall in the past, and identify patterns that could lead to better climate model projections for the future. 

 With the world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, engineers and scientists are looking for ways to meet the increasing demand for food without also increasing the strain on natural resources, such as water and energy, an initiative known as the food-water-energy nexus.

Many patients with serious diseases are not helped by their medications because treatment is started too late. An international research team led from Linköping University is launching a unique strategy for discovering a disease progression in its earliest phase.

The study, to be published in Science Translational Medicine, has been led by Professor Mikael Benson and Dr Mika Gustafsson at the Centre for Individualized Medication (CIMed).

"We're addressing one of the biggest problems in healthcare, one that leads to a great deal of suffering and enormous costs in terms of drugs and drug development. An important reason for this is that treatment is often not started until the patient has enough symptoms for a diagnosis using conventional methods," says Prof Benson.

How does our brain develop the ability to perform complex cognitive functions, such as those needed for language and reasoning? This is a question that certainly we are all asking ourselves, to which the researchers are not yet able to give a complete answer. We know that in the human brain there are about one hundred billion neurons that communicate by means of electrical signals. We learned a lot about the mechanisms of production and transmission of electrical signals among neurons.

Agriculturally rich nations are a little spoiled about food. A few years ago Europe even limited how 'ugly' fruit could be when it was being sold to the public, presumably because Europeans deserve pretty fruit.

For that reason, it's little surprise that there is concern about browning in apples. After being sliced open, the color starts to fade quickly, and in a hyper-vigilant culture where 99 percent of the public has never worked on a farm, parents and consumers may think that this 'browning' means the apple is bad. It gets thrown away, which leads to food waste.

Recent experiments at the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at the University of California, Los Angeles, have successfully excited elusive plasma waves, known as whistler-mode chorus waves, which have hitherto only been observed in the Earth's near-space environment. These chorus waves were accidentally discovered as early as World War I by radio operators deploying long lines intended to intercept enemy communication, and were subsequently dubbed "dawn chorus" since the sound of the radio signal when played through loudspeakers sounded like the distant chirping of a rookery of birds.