Science

An undergraduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has learned very quickly that a spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down. In fact, with his invention, the sugar may actually be the medicine.
Among the most important and complex molecules in the human body, sugars control not just metabolism but also how cells communicate [...]

An international consortium of scientists, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has decoded the genome of the platypus, showing that the animal’s peculiar mix of features is reflected in its DNA. An analysis of the genome, published today in the journal Nature, can help scientists piece together a more complete picture [...]

A team of Filipino and American scientists have rediscovered a highly distinctive mammal ¨C a greater dwarf cloud rat ¨C that was last seen 112 years ago. Furthermore, it has never before been discovered in its natural habitat and was thought by some to be extinct.
The greater dwarf cloud rat (Carpomys melanurus) has dense, soft [...]

It has long been known that birds and many other animals including turtles, salamanders and lobsters, use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, but the nature of their global positioning systems (GPS) has not been completely understood.
One school of thought hypothesizes that birds use magnetically-sensitive chemical reactions initiated by light (called chemical magnetoreception) to orient [...]

A new study may end the century-old controversy over what ingredient in absinthe caused the exotic green aperitif’s supposed mind-altering effects and toxic side-effects when consumed to excess. In the most comprehensive analysis of old bottles of original absinthe — once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso to enhance their [...]

Putting more meat on the theory that dinosaurs’ closest living relatives are modern-day birds, molecular analysis of a shred of 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein — along with that of 21 modern species — confirms that dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators.
The work, published this week in the journal [...]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but humans may have even less to work with than previously thought. University of Missouri researchers found that the average person can keep just three or four things in their “working memory” or conscious mind at one time. This finding may lead to better ways to assess [...]

Chemical engineers have developed a “self-assembling” method that could lead to an inexpensive way of making diamondlike crystals to improve optical communications and other technologies.
The method, developed at Purdue University, works by positioning tiny particles onto a silicon template containing precisely spaced holes that are about one-hundredth the width of a human hair. The template [...]

The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries.
More than 200 years ago Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.
And the so-called musica universalis or “music of the spheres” emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial [...]

When a tiny, quantum-scale, hypothetical balloon is popped in a vacuum, do the particles inside spread out all over the place as predicted by classical mechanics”
The question is deceptively complex, since quantum particles do not look or act like air molecules in a real balloon. Matter at the infinitesimally small quantum scale is both a [...]

Typing on a keyboard or scribbling on paper may be similar activities, but there is a significant difference in how the body moves, according to new motor development research.
“In language we start with letters that lead to syllables that lead to words, and we use grammar to put everything together,” said Howard N. Zelaznik, a [...]

It’s amazing that nobody has spotted it before. Superimposed on every ocean on the planet there is a striped pattern of currents. Yet what causes them is a mystery.
Between 1992 and 2003, Peter Niiler of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and colleagues collected data from more than 10,000 drifting ocean buoys, [...]

The world’s oldest recorded tree is a 9,550 year old spruce in the Dalarna province of Sweden.
The spruce tree has shown to be a tenacious survivor that has endured by growing between erect trees and smaller bushes in pace with the dramatic climate changes over time.
For many years the spruce tree has been regarded as [...]

Evolution has taken another step away from being dismissed as “a theory” in the classroom, thanks to a new paper published this week in the online open-access journal PLoS Biology. The research article, by Brian Paegel and Gerald Joyce of The Scripps Research Institute, California, documents the automation of evolution: they have produced a computer-controlled [...]

Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals can tell when time passes. Newly published research from The University of Western Ontario may bring us closer to answering that very question.
The results of the research, entitled Episodic-Like [...]

The mechanism behind different types of lightning may now be understood, thanks to a combination of direct observation and computer modeling reported by a team of researchers from New Mexico Tech and Penn State.
“Our explanation provides a unifying view of how lightning escapes from a thundercloud,” the researchers report in the April edition of Nature [...]

How did nature make the squid’s beak super hard and sharp — allowing it, without harm to its soft body — to capture its prey?
The question has captivated those interested in creating new materials that mimic biological materials. The results are published in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
The sharp beak of the Humboldt [...]

There is new promise on the horizon for those who suffer from REM Sleep Behaviour Disorder (RBD) according to researchers at the University of Toronto.
RDB, a neurological disorder that causes violent twitches and muscle contractions during rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, can lead to serious injuries. John Peever, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, discovered [...]

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the human brain that is shedding light on how human language evolved. The study marks the first use of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a non-invasive imaging technique, to compare human brain structures to those of chimpanzees, our closest [...]

It’s common knowledge that humans and other animals are able to visually judge depth because we have two eyes and the brain compares the images from each. But we can also judge depth with only one eye, and scientists have been searching for how the brain accomplishes that feat.
Now, a team led by a scientist [...]