Scientists chase unicorns because a world with unicorns, metaphorically speaking, is a better place.

Michigan State University plant biologist Maren Friesem felt like she was on a unicorn hunt searching for bacteria that could fix their own nitrogen. And she found one, as detailed in the current issue of Scientific Reports - the elusive bacteria Streptomyces thermoautotrophicus.  

Most nitrogen-fixing bacteria use an enzyme that does not work when oxygen is present. The heat and toxic gas-loving strain that Friesen studied appeared to have exceptional properties, including harboring a special enzyme that was insensitive to oxygen. So why go on such a quest?

When the moon is high in the sky, it creates bulges in the planet's atmosphere that creates imperceptible changes in the amount of rain that falls below.

New University of Washington research to be published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the lunar forces affect the amount of rain - though very slightly.

Vice President Joe Biden's 'moonshot' initiative to defeat cancer - an outline which will be written by political staffers and delivered a month before the Obama administration leaves office - received support from 50 percent of Americans, according to a survey funded by Research!America.

Not really a surprise, nearly half of Americans support more taxes on lots of things and may not realize we first began the War on Cancer during the Nixon administration over 40 years ago.

In the survey, support for more taxes to go toward government work on cancer was predictably along political lines, with Democrats 67% for it while Republicans (38%) and Independents (39%) are not.  

In 2010, a research team garnered attention when it published evidence of finding the first animals living in permanently anoxic conditions at the bottom of the sea. But a new study, led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), raises doubts.

One alternative scenario is that cadavers of multicellular organisms were inhabited by bacteria capable of living in anoxic conditions, and these "bodysnatchers" made it seem that the dead animals were living, said Joan Bernhard, a geobiologist with WHOI and the lead author of the new study published in the December 2015 issue of the scientific journal BMC Biology.

Political journalists will file countless reports from Iowa in the final days leading up to the caucuses, much of based on polls.

Another poll, this one by the Iowa State University/WHO-HD Iowa Caucus Poll, finds that voters rely on a variety of these reports and national television news still leads. 

The Director of the Centers for Disease Control recently highlighted a campaign to convince up to 86 million Americans that they have pre-diabetes, a condition that doesn't even exist. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is concerned that health care costs under the Affordable Care Act have skyrocketed and millennials are opting to pay the penalty rather than get the health care, which could be twice as expensive. 

Historically called the disease of kings, gout was common among wealthy gents who could afford to eat and drink to excess. These days it doesn’t just affect the rich: rates of gout have been increasing globally since the 1960s. It now affects around 70,000 Australians a year and is more common in men aged over 70.

Worldwide, the prevalence is highest in Taiwan (2.6% of the population and 10.4% of Indigenous Taiwanese) and among the New Zealand Maori (6.1%).

The Molecular Microbiology Research Group in the UAB's Department of Genetics and Microbiology describes for the first time, in a work published in PLOSone, a model of behaviour of a bacterial colony that shows how the colony protects itself against toxic substances, like antibiotics, during the colonisation process.

The researchers have determined that alteration of the equilibrium between two proteins of Salmonella enterica in the presence of antibiotics leads to the disorganisation of the structures that allow the population to spread, which in turn stops the progress of the cells in the bacterial colony that are nearest to harmful concentrations of antibiotic, while the rest spread into areas with lower concentrations.