Genetic basis of color diversity in coral reefs discovered
They have found that instead of using a single gene to control pigment production, corals use multiple copies of the same gene. We show that increased light levels switch the genes o...
Earliest known piece of polyphonic music discovered
It is the earliest practical example of a piece of polyphonic music – the term given to music that combines more than one independent melody – ever discovered. The piece was discover...
Curiosity rover finds active, ancient organic chemistry on Mars
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected fluctuations in methane concentration in the atmosphere, implying both types of activity occur on modern Mars. Curiosity also detected differ...
Comet landing named Physics World 2014 Breakthrough of the Year – Physics World
The Physics World 2014 Breakthrough of the Year goes to ESA’s Rosetta mission for being the first to land a spacecraft on a comet. Launched in 2004, Rosetta itself reached the comet ...
California needs 11 trillion gallons of water: NASA
A vehicle raises a large dust cloud as it drives on a parched farm field in Los Banos, California on September 23, 2014 California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from...
An avocado a day keeps the cardiologist away
Previous studies have suggested that avocados are a cholesterol-lowering food, but this is the first study – to the researchers’ knowledge – to look at health implications of avocado...
A rare glimpse at the elusive saharan cheetah
Research by scientists and conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Zoological Society of London, and other groups published today in PLOS ONE shows that critical...
When life returned after a volcanic mass extinction
A worldwide mass extinction 201.5 million years ago wiped out 60 percent of sea life, including coral reefs and shelled marine animals. On land, the dead included many plants as well...
What Philae did in its 60 hours on Comet 67P
Right- or left-handed life Four billion years ago the solar system was an unsettled place. These compounds may well have triggered the chemistry that led to life on our planet. Stru...
Trinity scientists make breakthrough in understanding Parkinson’s disease
The scientists showed that the Parkin protein functions to repair or destroy damaged nerve cells, depending on the degree to which they are damaged People living with Parkinson’s di...
Symbiotic plants are more diverse, finds new study
The study finds that when plants develop mutually beneficial relationships with animals, mainly insects, those plant families become more diverse by evolving into more species over t...
Supercomputing beyond genealogy reveals surprising European ancestors
Right: Blue eyes and dark skin, that’s how the European hunter-gatherer appeared 7,000 years ago. The main finding was that modern Europeans seem to be a mixture of three different a...
Study suggests how mosquitoes evolved an attraction to human scent
Those collected in the forest were black and tended to prefer the laboratory guinea pigs. Researchers report that the yellow fever mosquito sustains its taste for human blood thanks ...
Study: Farmers and scientists divided over climate change
More than 90 percent of the scientists and climatologists surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with more than 50 percent attributing climate change primarily to ...
Some plants regenerate by duplicating their DNA
Credit: L. Brian Stauffer When munched by grazing animals (or mauled by scientists in the lab), some herbaceous plants overcompensate - producing more plant matter and becoming more...
Six weighty facts about gravity
We also recognize that gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. The force of gravity on an astronaut...
Six to 10 million years ago: Ice-free summers at the North Pole
In this context, one of our expedition’s aims was to recover long sediment cores from the central Arctic, that can be used to reconstruct the history of the ocean’s sea ice cover thr...
Psychotropic drug prescriptions: Therapeutic advances or fads?
She recalls that for much of the nineteenth century, physicians based their diagnostic and therapeutic approach on the specificity of patients, and not diseases. Psychiatry was thus ...
Primate evolution in the fast lane
The discovery raises questions about the accuracy of using the more typical mutation process as an estimate to date when two species diverged, as well as the extent to which this and...
Optical approach offers faster and less expensive method for carbon dating
The instrument, which uses a new approach called saturated-absorption cavity ring-down (SCAR), is described in The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research, Optica. The res...
Neanderthal Y chromosome offers clues to what kept us separate species
Researchers reporting in the American Journal of Human Genetics, published by Cell Press, have completed the first in-depth genetic analysis of a Neanderthal Y chromosome. The Y chro...
Large variations in precipitation over the past millennium
Indirect recorders of past precipitation and drought variability such as tree-ring width data were used by the re-searchers to reconstruct twelve centuries of Northern Hemisphere hyd...
Can corals keep up with ocean acidification?
An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by University of Delaware professors Wei-Jun Cai and Mark Warner has successfully measured both pH and carbonate ion concentration direct...
Calculating evolution: Program predicts the development of influenza viruses
Together with researchers from Cambridge and Santa Barbara scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen have developed an algorithm that can predict t...
Brain protein influences how the brain manages stress; suggests new model of depression
Using mouse models exposed to chronic social stress, Mount Sinai investigators discovered that it is the activity of the protein in the D2 neurons, a specific set of nerve cells (neu...