If the U.S. wants to keep its prominence as a world power and technological innovator in the 21st century, we need to work fast.
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark…
A “miniature honeycomb” – or scaffold – could one day be used to encourage damaged nerves to grow and recover, according to an international group of researchers. The scaffold can channel clusters of nerves through its honeycomb of holes, eventually healing a severed nerve. The findings of their study on mouse nerves are published in…
Some people are generous–others, not so much. Why is that? A new study from Switzerland suggests that the answer to that question may be a matter of neuroanatomy, with the brains of altruistic types having more “gray matter” in a region of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction. It’s the first study to show…
Researchers described roughly 15,000 to 18,000 new species in 2012, making choosing the most noteworthy a monstrous task. “[It’s] worse than asking me which of my children is my favorite,” quipped Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist at Arizona State University, in an email to The Scientist. Wheeler and his colleagues at the International Institute for Species…
A trio of recent studies faults a common family of corn pesticides for disorienting honeybees, potentially leading to colony collapse disorder. The German chemical company Bayer, which manufactures the pesticides, disagrees.
It’s long been suspected that administering large amounts of antibiotics to livestock promotes antibiotic resistance. Now a new study describes how a particularly nasty strain of MRSA—the CC398 strain found primarily in pigs but also in cattle and poultry—likely did that. Sequencing the genomes of 88 closely-related strains of S. aureus, the researchers found the…