Colors are not constant, they are relative and relatively speaking, bees see much differently than we do.

Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Imperial College London have developed what they call FReD – the Floral Reflectance Database – that holds data on what colors flowers appear to be, to bees.    Records of flower colors don't take the visual systems of pollinator insects into account and bees have evolved completely different color detection mechanisms from humans so they see colors outside our own capabilities in the ultra-violet range.

While the average lifespan of those who reach adulthood has continued to rise those years spent living without health issues have not kept pace.

From 1970 to 2005, the probability of a 65-year-old surviving to age 85 doubled, from about a 20 percent chance to a 40 percent chance and the presumption was that the same changes allowing people to live longer, including medical advances, would delay the onset of disease and allow people to spend fewer years of their lives with debilitating illness.

Instead, a 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her life span than a 20-year-old a decade ago.

What gives?

The mechanisms are used by plants when they extract water from very dry or inhospitable land could provide insight into how to do the same thing more efficiently for people.

"In the case of mangrove swamps, for example, the plants are able to extract freshwater from a saltwater environment, despite the fact that the osmotic pressure should make quite the opposite happen," says Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, who studies this type of relatively unknown phenomenon as part of a new line of research that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at  Carlos III University of Madrid has begun.

If you have read any science fiction, you know what a railgun is; instead of using a projectile hurled by an explosion, the idea is to use an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive bullet or artillery moves along electrically charged parallel rails out of the barrel at speeds as high as Mach 7. 

The result: a weapon that can hit a target 100 miles or more away within minutes, seven times as far as current ship-mounted guns.

The age-old dilemma: do you take your sig other's hints, buy that electronic picture frame, and load it with family highlights from holidays past (yawn)? Or do you go with your gut and get her the unexpected gift of a new XBox-360?

Most are unaware of it but the evolutionary arms race between plants and plant diseases is always happening around us.  Fungi are a major cause of plant diseases and are responsible for large-scale harvest failure in crops like maize and other cereals all over the world.  

Researchers analyzed the genetic make-up of Sporisorium reilianum, an important maize parasite. Based on a comparison with the genome of a related fungal species, they succeeded in identifying new genes in maize infestation.