Conservationists desperately want to minimize the impact of overfishing on the oceans and their inhabitants. Doing so requires defining which species are most ...

It will come to no surprise to those interested in science that there is a lot of shoddy science coverage out there. The past ...

Although humanity has hunted a number of species to extinction, most of the problems we've created are inadvertent, in that they stem from habitat ...

Seems like every week astronomers find a new exoplanet, one that's the biggest or the smallest or the hottest or most habitable. However, this week astronomers ...

Lithography is the enabling technology behind almost all geek pursuits. Making chips that have more processing power, use less power, or have a smaller ...

Although our catalog of exoplanets is expanding rapidly, researchers are still looking for one that can unequivocally play host to liquid water on its ...

The "wisdom of the crowd" has become a bit of a pop cliché, but it's backed up by real-world evidence. When groups of ...

The so-called "hockey stick" plot of recent climate, in which recent temperatures appear as a sudden and anomalous rise after a thousand years of ...

Synthetic biology attempts to generate biomolecules with new and/or improved activities for use as, say, drugs or fuel. One way of producing new biomolecules ...

Scottingham sends this quote from PhysOrg: "A single interneuron controls activity adaptively in 50,000 neurons, enabling consistently sparse codes for odors (abstract). The brain is a coding machine: it translates physical inputs from the world into visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile perceptions ...

Subsurface oceans may be a common features of the moons of our solar system's gas giants. Evidence has piled ...

The fungus kingdom contains diverse eukaryotic organisms, including the yeast that we add in fermentation to make beer, the mold that grows on old ...

Barn owls have a pretty tough job: in near-darkness, they need to catch at least two little critters a day to feed themselves, ...

The negotiations that produced the US constitution left us with a democracy that's not quite representative. Even the most sparsely populated states have ...

Saturn's moon Titan appears to be a very active place, with evidence of liquid hydrocarbon rains and surface features, along with things like mountains ...

Credit cards as therapy for feeling like a dweeb: Retail therapy is apparently a real thing if you're feeling worthless. But demonstrating ...

Most organisms with brains can store and process a staggering range of information. The fundamental unit of the brain, a single neuron, however, ...

disco_tracy writes "Imagine a room where a band is playing. Neighbors can't hear the music, but if someone outside the room is talking, the musicians can hear it. The concept — a kind of one-way mirror for sound — seems ...

The Vatican Pontifical Academy of Sciences has just released a strongly worded report (PDF) on global climate change demanding in the strongest possible language ...

An anonymous reader writes "Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers new clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, say researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale ...

thomst writes "Juan Collar, team leader of COGENT, an experimental effort to detect WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), recently presented a paper detailing 15 months of data collected via a pure germanium detector located deep in a Minnesota mine which ...

Ever wonder how a colony of ants could survive a flood? Apparently the Brazilian fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, can self-assemble into hydrophobic rafts of thousands of ...

With all the focus on the potential future impacts of climate change and ocean acidification, it's possible to lose track of the fact that ...

In 2007, a talented pair of scientist-programmers called Mekentosj released Papers, a Mac OS X app that did for scientific literature what iTunes did ...

Waste heat has been a very tempting energy source, simply because there's so much of it around. Lots of the heat from burning ...

In the developed world, rates of autism spectrum diagnoses have skyrocketed in recent years, raising the specter that a new environmental factor has been ...

An anonymous reader writes "In the afternoon of May 4, 1971, in the Stouffer's Somerset Inn in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Steve Cook presented his STOC paper proving that Satisfiability is NP-complete and Tautology is NP-hard. 'The theorems suggest that Tautology ...

Third Position sends this excerpt from PhysOrg: "How well our brain functions is largely based on our family's genetic makeup, according to a University of Melbourne led study. The study ... provides the first evidence of a genetic effect on how ...

Since our coverage of the San Diego science festival in 2009, science festivals have built momentum. Roughly 17 states will hold at least one ...

Your heart is not a morning organ: Circadian rhythms, the changes your body undergoes based on time of day, influence a huge number ...

The PhD problem: are we giving out too many degrees?: The worldwide PhD output is increasing every year, and bestowing all these advanced degrees ...

For years, debate has raged about the validity of IQ tests. Critics claim that these tests are subject to all sorts of biases, ...

Angela Belcher's research group at MIT has made a name for itself by using viruses—the biological kind—as a key part in a variety of ...

Sleep deprivation is one of the most common forms of mental impairment, as it reduces performance in a variety of cognitive and motor tasks. ...

This morning, a press release dropped that seemed designed to create controversy, given its title: "Guns in the home provide greater health risk ...