Science News

• share
• favorite_border

At the grocery store, most foods — meats, breads, cheeses, snacks — come wrapped in plastic packaging. Not only does this create a lot of non-recyclable, non-biodegradable waste, but thin plastic films are not great at preventing spoilage. And some plastics are suspected of leaching potentially harmful compounds into food. To address these issues, scientists are now developing a packaging film made of milk proteins — and it is even edible.

• share
• favorite_border

Preventing the extinction of gorillas, rhinoceroses, elephants, lions, tigers, wolves, bears and the world's other largest mammals will require bold political action and financial commitments from nations worldwide. In an article in the journal BioScience, 43 wildlife experts write that without immediate changes, many of the Earth's most iconic species will be lost.

• share
• favorite_border

What does one need to strengthen or toughen concrete? A lot of nothing. Or something.

• share
• favorite_border

In December of last year, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced startling results hinting at the existence of an undiscovered subatomic particle — one with a mass six times heavier than the Higgs boson, the particle that made headlines in 2012.

• share
• favorite_border

Which organic fertilizer will produce the best green chile? A graduate student is researching three types of organic fertilizers: compost, processed chicken manure and compost tea. She is studying plant growth, fruit yield and quality of two hybrid long green chile varieties.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists have shown that people who exercise for even a few hours each week can enlarge their hearts. This is a normal and beneficial response to exercise, but until now has only been recognised in athletes. The researchers say that doctors should now consider an individual’s activity level before diagnosing common heart conditions.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) have identified a new potential target for drugs to prevent type 2 diabetes. A paper published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that blocking a cellular glucose sensor in muscle improves insulin responsiveness.

• share
• favorite_border

Whether or not they aced the subject in high school, human beings are physics masters when it comes to understanding and predicting how objects in the world will behave. Cognitive scientists have found the source of that intuition, the brain’s “physics engine.”

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers from Vanderbilt University, Nissan North America and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to apply nanotechnology to fuel cells to give them more oomph.

• share
• favorite_border

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performance surpasses expectations; results confirm the Higgs particle, show "bump" appears to be a statistical fluctuation, and offer insight into quark-gluon plasma at high energies complementary to those explored at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

• share
• favorite_border

Coatings or paints are materials applied to different surfaces basically for decorative and protective purposes. Yet today the market for these materials is being subjected to increasingly tougher specifications. In addition to being decorative and protective, today's coatings must have additional properties such as, for example, low microorganism-adherence, ease of cleaning or self-repair properties. The development of materials of this type, known as "functional coatings", calls for the control not only of their physical properties (mainly to do with their morphology) but also of the chemical ones of the surfaces produced.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

DHS S&T today announced a $40M funding opportunity for an institution to lead a new DHS Center of Excellence (COE) for Homeland Security Quantitative Analysis.

• share
• favorite_border

Looking different to your parents can provide species with a way to escape evolutionary dead ends, according to new research from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists in their preliminary findings suggest signs of life from under Mars' surface may not survive in rocks excavated by some meteorite impacts.

• share
• favorite_border

University of Adelaide researchers are rethinking plant breeding strategies to improve the development of new high-yielding, stress-tolerant cereal varieties.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists from the NOvA collaboration have announced an exciting new result that could improve our understanding of the behavior of neutrinos.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a way to direct the self-assembly of multiple molecular patterns within a single material, producing new nanoscale architectures. This is a significant conceptual leap in self-assembly that could change the way we design and manufacture electronics.

• share
• favorite_border

The social lives of crickets are similar generation to generation, even though the insects can't learn directly from their mum and dad.

• share
• favorite_border

In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the “sterile neutrino.” Now, with the latest results from an icy particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle.