Scientists have demonstrated that mobility can be restored in patients with Parkinson's disease, the major degenerative disease of the motor system worldwide.  The experiments used stem cells to…

Ben Allanach, guest blogger, is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is grumpy about the way that public funds are being unnecessarily directed to scientific…

Ah, Cuba. My father’s college roommate’s mother – are you following so far? – was a travel agent, and had gone on one of these agent junkets to Havana. She danced with the dictator Batista at a…

The evolution of trichromatic color vision in humans occurred by first switching from the ability to detect UV light to blue light between 80 and 30 million years ago and then by adding green-…

Auroras are the most visible manifestation of the sun's effect on Earth, but many aspects of these spectacular displays are still poorly understood. One particular type of very high-latitude aurora…

Predictions about specific effects of climate change were once common - but they turned out to be spectacularly wrong so there are fewer these days. In 2006, former Vice-President Al Gore said by…

City folk may not think much of rural living - but they are healthier. A new study finds that diabetes, once rather uncommon, is now affecting 387 million people worldwide - and 77 percent of it…

Computers don't really boot up any faster than they have in decades and that is due to limitations in electric currents (and ignoring the bloated software rolled out after every new chip), which…

There is a running joke in America that there are three times as many people in the U.S. claiming to be Irish as there are actual people in Ireland.  Though it's nice to claim to be Irish…

Climate change impacts could mean uncertain transformations of global agriculture systems by 2050, according to a new paper from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. …