Almost half a century ago the creators of Star Wars imagined a life-sustaining planet, Tatooine, orbiting a pair of stars. Now, 44 years later, scientists have found new evidence that that five known systems with multiple stars, Kepler-34, -35,...
Some snake species slither across the ground, while others climb trees, dive through sand or glide across water. Today, scientists report that the surface chemistry of snake scales varies among species that negotiate these different terrains. The findings could...
How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That's a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
What the team found, to be...
Investigators in China and the United States have injected human stem cells into primate embryos and were able to grow chimeric embryos for a significant period of time -- up to 20 days. The research, despite its ethical concerns,...
Two opposing evolutionary forces explain the presence of the two different colors of spotted salamander egg masses at ponds in Pennsylvania, according to a new study led by a Penn State biologist. Understanding the processes that maintain biological diversity...
Researchers have used a technique similar to MRI to follow the movement of individual atoms in real time as they cluster together to form two-dimensional materials, which are a single atomic layer thick.
The results, reported in the journal Physical Review...
Ants react to social isolation in a similar way as do humans and other social mammals. A study by an Israeli-German research team has revealed alterations to the social and hygienic behavior of ants that had been isolated from...
Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology article), Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M....
A paper by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Director Ooguri Hirosi and Project Researcher Matthew Dodelson on the string theoretical effects outside the black hole photon sphere has been selected for...
Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes.
Now,...
