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Two U.S. scientists shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for learning how cells respond to the world around them, a finding that underpins many prescription drugs on the market today, from beta blockers and antihistamines to various kinds of psychiatric medications. Brian Kobilka, 57, of Stanford University Medical School, and 69-year-old Robert Lefkowitz, of the…
Typically, when we talk about pollution, including carbon emissions, the numbers are talking about entire areas rather than specific locations. Researchers in the US have developed a new software system that is able to accurately map carbon emissions at the street level. The new system allows you to see each individual building, and the carbon…
From Michaela Pommells at Huffington Post: Let’s face it, race inequity may not be a deliberate goal of education policy and practice (or maybe it is) but neither is it accidental. The result is a whole lot of seemingly well-meaning people trying to evoke change in an education system that never intended to educate people…
Much like a toddler in a sandbox, the Curiosity rover has been busy scooping up the Martian soil lately. All that digging around was brought to a halt by the discovery of a small, bright object. NASA is currently trying to sort out what it is. NASA is attempting to identify the bit of mystery…
If we’re going to get science policy right, it’s really important for us to study the economic benefit of open access and not accept the arguments of incumbents. Existing media companies claim that they need ever stronger and longer copyright protection and new, draconian laws to protect them, and meanwhile, new free ecosystems, like the…
Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the U.S. shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising clever laboratory experiments that made it possible to control ghostly quantum particles, an achievement that many theoretical physicists believed could never be done. The work has already led to the creation of clocks more than 100…
This year’s record melt in northern latitudes has surprised – even shocked – many climate scientists. While most of the public attention has focused on the sixth record melt in a row of Arctic summer sea ice, an even bigger story has gone largely unreported. That’s been the record melt of the massive Greenland ice-sheet…
The living slime that may have been the muse for the 1958 science-fiction film The Blob just got creepier: Evidence has emerged that slime mold, a brainless single-celled organism, has a form of memory. In experiments with the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, scientists at the University of Sydney noticed that the life-form avoided retracing its…
Researchers have found what they say is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attack on prey caught in its web – a 100 million-year-old snapshot of an engagement frozen in time. The extraordinarily rare fossils are in a piece of amber that preserved this event in remarkable detail, an action that took place…
The United States ranks just 31st globally in student achievement in math. Annually, fewer than 60,000 American college graduates earn degrees in the top five engineering majors — a number woefully insufficient to fill industry needs and fuel innovation. It’s imperative that educators inspire the next generation of students — not simply to staff the…