The National Health Service (NHS), the United Kingdom's public health care systems, wasted $976 million during the years 2000-2009 on synthetic forms of insulin, when the recommended human alternatives, which are considerably cheaper, would have been just as effective, based on an analysis of publicly available data from the four UK prescription pricing agencies. Costs were adjusted for inflation and reported at 2010 prices.

Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping the Higgs boson is found at the LHC for a big reason - they think it can explain universal expansion and even reveal the possible existence of another closely related particle.

The Higgs boson would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. but a group of EPFL physicists say it would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth - and it could be verified with data from the Planck satellite.

A new plant species is appropriately named Spigelia genuflexa because after fruits are formed, the fruiting branches 'bend down' and deposit  the capsules with seeds on the ground and sometimes burying them in the soft cover of moss, a phenomenon called geocarpy.

Geocarpy ensures that the seeds end up as close to the mother plant as possible, facilitating its propagation the following season. A famous example of geocarpy, a rare adaptation to growing in harsh or ephemeral environments, is the well-known peanut, which is from from the legume family and buries its fruits in the ground.

We've often defended Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.  Publishing 50 years before Darwin, he can be forgiven for not having 'the greatest idea anyone ever had' and in the last few years,  geneticists have gotten on board as well and no longer dismiss out of hand his belief that acquired traits can be passed on to offspring.

Much of the pre-Darwin thinking was teleological and that is why natural selection in evolution met so much resistance.  But science quickly won and Lamarck's theory of transformation went onto the ash heap of biological history. Yet in the last decade, we have learned that the environment can leave traces in the genomes of animals and plants, in the form of epigenetic modifications.