We've long been fascinated by but it has been fictional. Now a team of researchers has created a perceptual illusion of having an invisible body. You won't just 'feel' invisible like no one notices you in a crowd, you can actually feel invisible.

The history of literature features many well-known narrations of invisibility and its effect on the human mind, such as the myth of Gyges' ring in Plato's dialogue The Republic and the science fiction novel The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.

Recent advances in materials science have shown that invisibility cloaking real world objects might soon be possible in the visible light spectrum. How might invisibility affect our brain and body perception?

Rapid treatment with a new anti-inflammatory called
C5aR
could have a major impact on recovery from spinal cord injury.

University of Queensland School of Biomedical Sciences researchers Dr. Marc Ruitenberg and Ph.D. student Faith Brennan said they made the discovery during laboratory trials with an experimental drug. Brennan said that excessive inflammation caused additional damage in spinal cord injuries and hindered recovery. 

One cornerstone of the Science 2.0 approach is the framework for making Big Data manageable. In fields from physics to biology, it's no longer a question of obtaining data, but managing it in ways that are relevant.

It's been problematic in science just as it has been in business and the public sector because relationships between the different parts of a network have been represented as simple links, regardless of how many ways they can actually interact, and that results in a loss of valuable information in science.

Daily consumption of capsaicin, the active compound of chilli peppers, was found to have beneficial effects on liver damage. The study found capsaicin reduced the activation of hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) in mice models. HSCs are the major cell type involved in liver fibrosis, which is the formation of scar tissue in response to liver damage.

The mice were split into two groups and received capsaicin in their food:

After three days of bile duct ligation (BDL) in which the common bile duct is obstructed, leading to bile accumulation and liver fibrosis

For me, it was hornets.

One summer afternoon when I was 12, I ran into an overgrown field near a friend’s house and kicked a hornet nest the size of a football. An angry squadron of insects clamped onto my leg; their stings felt like scorching needles. I swatted the hornets away and ran for help, but within minutes I realized something else was happening. A constellation of pink stars had appeared around the stings. The hives swelled, and new ones began appearing farther up my legs. I was having an allergic reaction.

Many scientists assume that the growing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will accelerate plant growth but a new study suggests much of this growth will be curtailed by limited soil nutrients so that by the end of the century, there may be more 10 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere, which would accelerate climate change.  

Cory Cleveland, a University of Montana associate professor of biogeochemistry, and co-authors looked at 11 leading climate models to examine changes in nitrogen and phosphorous. They found that nitrogen limitation actually will reduce plant uptake of CO2 by 19 percent, while a combined nitrogen and phosphorous limitation will reduce plant uptake by 25 percent. 

Sweet potatoes, one of the most important food crops for human consumption, contain genes from the bacterium Agrobacterium but that was not done by scientists. The foreign DNA that turned sweet potatoes into a GMO was put there by nature.

The researchers discovered the foreign DNA sequences of Agrobacterium while searching the genome - this is the entire DNA-code - of sweet potato for viral diseases. Instead of contributing this peculiar finding to bacterial contamination of the plant samples, the researchers decided to study these sequences in more detail.

Researchers have determined that the eardrum evolved independently in mammals and diapsids - the taxonomic group that includes reptiles and birds. Published in Nature Communications, the work shows that the mammalian eardrum depends on lower jaw formation, while that of diapsids develops from the upper jaw. Significantly, the researchers used techniques borrowed from developmental biology to answer a question that has intrigued paleontologists for years.