More than 15 million miles of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050, pushing back the frontiers of progress. Of course, progress may mean a loss of wilderness if it is not managed carefully, and authors have created a ‘global roadmap’ for prioritizing road building across the planet, to try to balance the competing demands of development and environmental protection.

Even for experienced readers, mirror-image letters like b/d or p/q can be confusing. Why is it difficult for some to differentiate these letters? 

Are you in the target market to eat insects? The easiest uptake will be by a young male who claims to care more about the environment, believes they are progressive and adventurous about food, and already doesn't care about meat. 

Matching those criteria, the likelihood that this type of person is willing to eat insects as a meat substitute is estimated more than 75%, according to a new paper published in Food Quality and Preference.

Glass is ideal for applications that require resistance to thermal shock or to chemically harsh environments and manufacturers commonly use additives such as boron oxide to tweak its properties by changing the atomic structure of glass.

Bending, stretching, twisting, folding, modern materials that are light, flexible and highly conductive are the future of products like artificial skin or electronic paper. 

But these "aerogel monoliths" have required precious gold and silver nanowires, which keeps them squarely in the field of basic research.  Making such concepts affordable with copper nanowires and a PVA "nano glue" could be a game-changer, and researchers at Monash University and the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication have developed a way. 

Despite its conductivity, copper's tendency to oxidation and the poor mechanical stability of copper nanowire aerogel monoliths are why its potential has been largely unexplored.

In a cell's nucleus, chromosomal DNA is tightly bound to structural proteins known as histones, an amalgam biologists call chromatin.

Until a few decades ago, histones were regarded as a nuclear "sidekick," the packing material around which the glamorous DNA strands were wrapped.