Plant growth patterns are influenced by a variety of stimuli, including gravity. Terrestrial plant roots exhibit characteristic behaviors called 'waving' and 'skewing' and those are thought to be gravity-dependent events. 

Not so, according to a study of Arabidopsis plants grown on the International Space Station (ISS).  Root 'waving' and 'skewing' occur even with no gravity.

The world's smallest reaction chamber has a mixing volume that can be measured in femtoliters - that's a million billionths of a liter.

The reaction chamber actually consists of nothing more than a tiny spray of liquid, produced by a technique known as electrospray ionization, in which a liquid is converted into lots of charged droplets by exposing it to a high voltage as it exits the nozzle of a thin capillary.

Like water being sprayed out of a hose, these charged droplets form a cone shape, known as a Taylor cone, as they are emitted from the nozzle. Because the electrospray process transforms any chemical entities within the liquid into ions, it is a commonly used technique for ionizing a liquid sample prior to analysis by mass spectrometry.

Are there really less pesticide residues on organic crops?  The answer might not be as simple as you think.

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite was able to estimate rainfall rates  of Typhoon Bopha over the Philippines, where severe flooding killed several hundred people. Bopha is now a tropical storm in the South China Sea but high winds, flooding and landslides from heavy rains with Typhoon Bopha have caused close to 300 deaths in the southern Philippines.

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is now 10 times better at catching the brief outbursts of high-energy light, known as  terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs),mysteriously produced above thunderstorms.

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes last only a few thousandths of a second but their gamma rays rank among the highest-energy light that naturally occurs on Earth. The enhanced GBM discovery rate helped scientists show most TGFs also generate a strong burst of radio waves, a finding that will change how scientists study this poorly understood phenomenon.

Fatty liver disease, diabetes and obesity are health issues that are not going to be solved during the holiday season.  The solution to much of it, healthier eating, is not realistic and so researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, examining the molecular mechanisms of how our body converts dietary carbohydrates into fat have found that disabling a gene with the catchy name BAF60c prevented carbohydrates from converting to fat, despite eating a high-carb diet. In mice, anyway  

Genetic research has a great deal of benefit but its mysteries, such as the lack of identified genetic determinants that explain heritability of complex traits, leave a lot of biology open to speculation, like that voting for one candidate may be 'biological' or that molecular changes to our genes -  epigenetic marks - are affected by what we eat.
 

 A large problem in making predictions about Antarctic melting is that we currently have insufficient knowledge about the ocean circulation near large glaciers in West Antarctica. This means that researchers cannot predict how water levels will change in the future with any large degree of certainty. 

What is known is that the ice sheet in West Antarctica is melting faster than expected, and new observations published by oceanographers in Nature Geoscience may improve the ability to predict future changes in ice sheet mass. 

Opinion surveys used by researchers from the Guttmacher Institute show overestimated figures of abortion in the Federal District of Mexico (Mexico DF) by as much as 10-fold, according to a paper in the International Journal of Women's Health, which highlights that the actual figure of induced abortion in Mexico DF has not surpassed 15,000 per year according to the official registry.

 The research group directly compared the estimations of induced abortion reported by the Guttmacher Institute and the actual figures reported by the GIRE (from the Spanish acronym Grupo de Información en Reproducción Electiva), institution that maintains epidemiological surveillance of abortion in Mexico DF since its decriminalization in 2007. 

In the US, we could soon have the government monitoring everything we do. So we might as well be happier about more effective ways to be fingerprinted. 

Integrated Biometrics, LLC has gotten FBI certification of its newest finger print technology, patented Light Emitting Sensor technology along with a thin film transistor. LES technology utilizes a charged polymer film interacting with the specific properties of human skin to luminesce fingerprint images, then the TFT captures the image at the FBI's standard 500 PPI requirement. The combination of LES and the thin film transistor enables size and weight reductions of up to 95% when compared to other products serving the same function.