After many years of painstaking work, Japanese researchers prove third time’s a charmThe most unambiguous data to date on the elusive 113th atomic element has…

As the search continues for Earth-size planets orbiting at just the right distance from their star, a region termed the habitable zone, the number of…

Fifth-graders making styrofoam solar system models may have the right idea. Researchers at Lehigh University have discovered a new planet orbiting a star 320…

A new highly maneuverable search and rescue robot that can creep, crawl and climb over rough terrain and through tight spaces has been developed by Ben-Gurion…

NASA missions like the space telescope Kepler have helped us document thousands of exoplanets – planets that orbit around other stars. And current NASA…

Earth of billions of years ago illuminated by light-capturing proteins. Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet. The earliest living things, including bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea, inhabited a primarily oceanic planet without an ozone layer to protect them from the sun’s radiation. These microbes evolved…

Researchers at Osaka University develop a new centipede-like robot and show how its motion can be switched from straight and curved walking, which may assist with search and rescue operations or planetary exploration. Researchers from the Department of Mechanical Science and Bioengineering at Osaka University have invented a new kind of walking robot that takes advantage of dynamic instability to navigate. By changing the flexibility of the couplings, the robot can be made to turn without the need for complex…

A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, all the primordial soup of matter in the Universe was `broken` into its most fundamental constituents. It was thought to have disappeared forever. However scientists strongly suspect that the exotic soup of dissolved matter can still be found in today`s Universe, in the core of certain very dense objects called neutron stars.

With ESA`s space telescope XMM-Newton, they are now closer to testing this idea. For the first time, XMM-Newton has been able

While the Cassini spacecraft has been flying toward Saturn, chemists on Earth have been making plastic pollution like that raining through the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Scientists suspect that organic solids have been falling from Titan’s sky for billions of years and might be compounds that set the stage for the next chemical step toward life. They collaborate in University of Arizona laboratory experiments that will help Cassini scientists interpret Titan data and plan a futur

On June 8 Earth-based solar telescopes will follow a tiny black orb as it appears to travel effortlessly across a wrinkled, brilliant sea. Timothy Brown, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will not sit idly by as Venus traverses the Sun for the first time in 122 years at an angle visible from Earth. Peering through a specialized solar telescope in the Canary Islands, Brown will study the chemical composition and winds of Venus’s upper atmosphere, a region poorly ob

It is now significantly easier to search long stretches of DNA for genetic changes associated with disease, thanks to scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The researchers developed a method called direct genomic selection that accelerates the transition between family or population-based studies of disease inheritance patterns and identification of genetic variations that may contribute to disease. That transition normally slows down dramatically wh

Astronomers are announcing today the first results of a search for extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs in an unlikely place–the stellar graveyard. The report, titled “Searching for Extrasolar Planets in the Stellar Graveyard,” is being presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego, California, by John Debes, a graduate student at Penn State; Steinn Sigurdsson, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University; Bruce Woodgate, of the NASA Goddard Spa

Clearance of beta amyloid accumulation within neurons stops memory decline in mice

Researchers at UC Irvine have identified a trigger at the molecular level that marks the onset of memory decline in mice genetically engineered to develop brain lesions – in the form of plaques and tangles – associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The trigger is a protein called “beta amyloid” that accumulates within neurons in the mice’s brains. Although several researchers have studied the

For scientists eying distant planets and solar systems for signs of alien activity, University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Carol Cleland suggests the first order of business is to keep an open mind.

It may be a mistake to try to define life, given such definitions are based on a single example — life on Earth, said Cleland, a philosophy professor and fellow at the NASA-funded CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology. The best strategy is probably to develop a “general theory of

The pressure is being felt not only by major international groups but also by the small and medium-size enterprises that fuel the job market in Germany. To…

The researchers found a new way of measuring the activity of a group of enzymes called DNA topoisomerases that help package DNA, the molecule that stores…

Dr Tom Pike and his team at Imperial’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering have provided substrates—surfaces used to hold samples for…

Cold “Super-Earths” — giant, “snowball” planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems — could potentially support some kind…

The new protocol was developed as part of a project to investigate life that exists in extreme Arctic environments, which are the closest analogue we have on…

The first genetic historical map of the Han Chinese, the largest ethnic population in the world, as they migrated from south to north over evolutionary time….