A new study finds that migratory birds that breed in Arctic Alaska are initiating nests earlier in the spring, and that snow melt occurring earlier in the season is a big reason for it.  

The researchers looked in nearly 2,500 nests of four shorebird species: semi-palmated sandpiper, red phalarope, red-necked phalarope, and pectoral sandpiper, and one songbird, the lapland longspur, and recorded when the first eggs were laid in each nest. The research occurred across four sites that ranged from the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay to the remote National Petroleum Reserve of western Arctic Alaska.

If there is a spill, the chemical makeup of wastewater generated by fracking could cause the release of tiny particles in soils that might bind heavy metals and pollutants, Cornell University researchers have found.

If you ask one scientist to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, unless they have worked specifically on that problem before, their guess won't be very accurate. But if you ask 500 random people, the mean of their responses will be quite accurate.

If you ask experts to predict the future of science and technology, will they be more accurate? SciCast, the government crowd-sourcing project, hopes so. They are asking for participants to make their predictions.

Knowing where water vapor is in the atmosphere is one of many factors forecasters use to identify weather features and so the GOES Project has created animations that indicate where water vapor is moving over the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans.

Observations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) measure the local air temperature in kelvins (degrees Kelvin) at different layers of the atmosphere.

Space debris in Earth's orbit, especially small things that are untraceable and unavoidable, have been a growing concern. Experiments and satellites need to be as light as possible so numerical simulation can be used to enhance or improve the protection structure of the spacecraft, and reduce the harm of the space debris. 

Biological membranes are like a guarded border. They separate the cell from the environment and at the same time control the import and export of molecules.

The nuclear membrane can be crossed via many tiny pores. Scientists have discovered that proteins found within the nuclear pore function similar to a velcro. In a new paper, they report how these proteins can be used for controlled and selective transport of particles.

There is much traffic in our cells. Many proteins, for example, need to travel from their production site in the cytoplasm to the nucleus, where they are used to read genetic information. Pores in the nuclear membrane enable their transport into and out of the cell nucleus.

If you have read about feminized frogs due to pesticides, or other scary claims by environmentalists, you may wonder why the EPA does not use those studies when registering chemicals.

The reason is because they often have no parallel to the real world. Chemical companies, despite claims by their cultural detractors, want to be overly cautious, while anti-science activists want to use enough exposure to create the effect they want to write about. In both cases, they use gavage dosing.

Anti-nuclear activists have done everything they can to keep the best green energy available, out of America, continuing a successful blockade they got President Clinton to implement 20 years ago. Back then, they misstated the science and insisted any nuclear physics was going to lead to nuclear bombs. Today, they insist that, thanks to gigantic regulatory hurdles, including a Nuclear Regulatory Commission run by an anti-nuclear activist, nuclear energy is too expensive.

It's often said that if we do make contact with Extra Terrestrials (ETs), e.g. detect a radio transmission from a distant galaxy through SETI, that maths would be one of the few things we would have in common with them. But - how similar would their maths actually be to ours?

Modern maths- with its many sizes of infinity and logical paradoxes, has lead to much debate and puzzlement over the last century or so. Would this be the same for ETs? And would it lead to many different ideas about maths and the philosophy of maths, as we have here, or would they find some other solution none of us have thought of?

Scare journalism is big business. Hardly a day goes by without mainstream media promoting "X is harmful to your health" claims based on surveys, epidemiology and suspect methodology.

As a result, people are taught to be afraid of Subway bread, beer, high fructose corn syrup, MSG and even gluten without a reason.

It's not a shock that a certain demographic is going to be be easily driven by fear and misperception. But who? The easy answer has long been Whole Foods shoppers, because they are against vaccines, traditional farming and increasingly seek more laws and regulations to save them from the unknown. States like California, New York and Washington are hotbeds of anti-science beliefs.