Modern methods can answer a multitude of questions but sometimes traditional techniques are superior. Recent studies from the James Bay region of northern Canada and the Torres Strait islands off Australia show just how valuable local knowledge can b
And in the final reversal, December has been far more active than the rest of the year. Five regions on the sun were active at once on the 22nd, as seen above.
A marine biologist says he has discovered a new crab species off the coast of southern Taiwan that looks like a strawberry with small white bumps on its red shell.
Researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have successfully created a transistor made from a single benzene molecule attached to gold contacts.
Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway's public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutti
It is estimated that 40 percent of the nation’s total grid energy losses are from aging conventional transformers and that the use of superconducting transformers could reduce energy losses on the grid by one-third – equivalent to eliminating about 1
The state Supreme Court said nothing in state law prevents patients from seeking physician-assisted suicide, making Montana the third state that will allow the procedure. Patients and doctors had been waiting for the state's high court to step in aft
Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner. Look clos
He was cleaning the glass tank of his pet, a Chilean Rose tarantula. While focused on cleaning a stubborn stain, he sensed movement in the terrarium and so turned his head. That's when the tarantula flicked a "mist of hairs" that hit him in the eyes
Europe's Goce satellite is returning remarkable new data on the way the pull of gravity varies across the Earth. Scientists say its first maps clearly show details not seen in previous space and ground measurements.
MOSCOW – Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent its collision with Earth — a collision NASA considers highly unlikely — the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday
This is legitimate science, and there's a great deal of public interest in it," said Alan Stern, a former assistant administrator at NASA who, in 2007, decided that proposals for extraterrestrial search programs should not be banned from the agency
Now, MIT researchers have developed tiny gold particles that can home in on tumors, and then, by absorbing energy from near-infrared light and emitting it as heat, destroy tumors with minimal side effects.
Last month there were 1,500 sea lions on San Francisco's fabled Pier 39, a record number that delighted tourists and baffled experts. Why so many? Why were they sticking around? Now, all the sea lions are gone, leaving the experts guessing where they
MUST SEE! It's 122 degrees F and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it's so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest
Host:
Ernest Hancock
Science, Medicine & Technology - Advances of 2009. What does the future look like?
Host:
Ernest Hancock
Science, Medicine & Technology - Advances of 2009. What does the future look like?
The technique depends on natural agents called zinc fingers, may revive the lagging fortunes of gene therapy because it overcomes the inability to insert genes at a chosen site. Treatments for bubble-boy disease, hemophilia and sickle-cell anemia
There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises. That time is now.
The apes' use of tools can be surprisingly sophisticated. "For example, nut-cracking in the Bossou chimpanzee community in Guinea involves the use of a movable hammer and anvil, and sometimes the additional use of stabilizing wedges to make the anvil
Five fans per wing are installed above the wing with the exhaust nozzle near the trailing edge. The fully superconducting motor outside diameter at 7.24 inches is an excellent match with the hub diameter of the fan exit, and the light weight of th
3D printing to order is a regular subject on TreeHugger; we love the idea of making things when you need them, where you need them. And soon you will be able to order up body parts, at a sort of Ponoko for pancreas. Now people sit on waiting lists, h
A team of researchers from Boston University are using electrical fields to efficiently draw long strands of DNA through nanopore sensors, drastically reducing the number of DNA copies required for a high throughput analysis.
Scientists have found a new way to rev the body's metabolism: Activate its fat cells. They envision a "brown fat pill" that boosts brown fat activity through molecular means. Here's the science behind the weight-loss breakthrough of the next decade.
What we need to do is to link the distribution directly to cell phone subscribers. Have the subscriber designate a health care provider (witch doctors included) to whom medicines can dispatched. The subscriber then takes responsibility for his famil
Combining artificial sweeteners with the real thing boosts the stomach's secretion of a hormone that makes people feel full and helps control blood sugar. There's some evidence that artificial sweeteners may trigger secretion of glucagon-like peptide
December 17th - 18th, 2009, Mojave, CA, USA and Yecheon-gun, ROK: The Yecheon Astro Space Center announced today that it has selected XCOR Aerospace as its preferred supplier of suborbital space launch services. Operating under a wet lease model, XC
In fact, it's so good at turning plant matter into fuel that researchers say their discovery calls into question the whole theory of how crude oil was made by nature in the first place.
The problem with organ transplants is that the organ has to come from someone else. Since most people rather fancy their hearts and lungs, getting any organ other than a kidney usually requires the difficult combination of donor consent and timely de
When physicist Vitaly Efimov heard his theory had finally been proven, he ran up to the young scientist who had verified it and gave him a high five. Efimov had predicted a quantum-mechanical version of Borromean rings, a symbol that first showed
