Like many other transgenic crops, Bt maize synthesises its own pesticide - a toxic protein produced in its leaves and stems, which kills pests in a matter of days.

It's perfect, except, as will eventually happen in all pest control instances, when insect populations develop resistance to the toxin.  That is why there are controls on how much Bt maize is in an area. To date, management strategies implemented to delay the evolution of resistance have been successful.

While you are reading this article, you could be getting a little smarter, but you could also be losing important information.

An idle brain is still doing important work and in the age of constant information overload, it’s a good idea to go offline on a regular basis, says Erik Fransén, a researcher from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Telomerase is an enzyme that is the hallmark of both aging and the uncontrolled cell division associated with cancer and in an effort to understand and control telomerase activity, researchers at The Wistar Institute have discovered a protein "motif," named TFLY, which is crucial to the function of telomerase.

Altering this motif disrupts telomerase function, they found, a fact that they believe will help them in their efforts to identify inhibitors of telomerase with potential cancer therapeutic properties. 

Calcium helps strengthen bones in people but it is also a critical nutrient for healthy tree growth and new research shows that adding it to the soil helps reverse the decades-long decline of forests ailing from the effects of acid rain. 

Europeans may be slightly less anti-science than they are portrayed - at least when it comes to food.

Though American activists want the USA to be more like Europe and ban GMOs (except, oddly, in the food that organic meat ate), that is either not a policy that actual European consumers wanted, or they have become more educated since those laws were passed, or surveys lack controls too much to be worthwhile.

Predicting the behavior of a sunspot cycle is fairly reliable once the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after the minimum in sunspot number occurs(1). Prior to that time the predictions are less reliable but planning for satellite orbits and space missions often require knowledge of solar activity levels years in advance.

A number of techniques are used to predict the amplitude of a cycle during the time near and before sunspot minimum. Relationships have been found between the size of the next cycle maximum and the length of the previous cycle, the level of activity at sunspot minimum, and the size of the previous cycle.