Why do some extremely faint galaxies in our backyard contain so few stars? An international team of astronomers has helped solve the mystery of why these galaxies are starved of stars - and why so few of them have been found.

Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major dwarf galaxies all started forming stars more than 13 billion years ago - and then abruptly stopped shortly after the Big Bang.The extreme age of their stars is similar to Messier 92, the oldest known globular cluster in the Milky Way.

Over the last half century, it has been established that fish and migratory birds use the planet's magnetic field to help find their way, an interesting zoological mystery. Researchers have now identified cells with internal compass needles for the perception of the field, and that can explain why high-tension cables perturb their magnetic orientation. 

Although many animal species can sense the geomagnetic field and exploit it for spatial orientation, efforts to pinpoint the cells that detect the field and convert the information into nerve impulses had not been successful.

A novel anticancer drug is designed to travel, undetected by normal cells, through the bloodstream until it becomes activated by specific cancer proteins.  It's basically a sleeper cell for tumors.

The drug, called G202, is chemically derived from a common Mediterranean weed called Thapsia garganica, and has been shown to destroy cancers and their direct blood supplies, acting like a 'molecular grenade' but sparing healthy blood vessels and tissues.

When you think of the northern lights (aurora borealis) you don't think of sounds. The famous blues, greens and reds rippling in the sky have been described by visitors and also handed down in stories as long as people have been visiting. Astronomers of King Nebuchadnezzar II  documented it in 568 B.C.

But later travelers described sounds to go with the light show. 

The lights happen when gas from the sun reaches earth's magnetic field; the charged particles flow along the planet's magnetic lines, but that is too far away for people to hear anything.

A new study has assessed the effectiveness of two somatostatin vaccinations, JH17 and JH18, in reducing weight gain and increasing weight loss in mice.

Somatostatin is a peptide hormone which inhibits the action of growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), both of which increase metabolism and result in weight loss. Vaccination with modified somatostatin caused the body to generate antibodies to somatostatin, effectively removing this inhibition without directly interfering with the growth hormones and subsequently increasing energy expenditure and weight loss.

In America, the last few years saw young females and males achieve math parity for the first time ever.  But girls are still anxious about math, and that has nothing to do with teachers or outreach or the oppression of a liberal democracy.

Mathematics anxiety is a state of discomfort associated with performing mathematics tasks and is believed to affect both children and adults, having a negative impact on their mathematics performance.   That makes sense.  Math is difficult and difficult subjects make people nervous.