Academics share one thing with the corporate world - most people want to climb the socio-economic ladder. A post at an elite university like Oxford or Caltech is the crowning achievement of a career…

A comparison of the genomes of polar bears and brown bears reveals that the polar bear is a much younger species than previously believed, having diverged from brown bears less than 500,000 years ago…

Patients whose lost red blood cells are recycled and given back to them during heart surgery have healthier blood cells compared to those who get transfusions of blood stored in a blood bank,…

If someone fails to meet an obligation, you probably feel a little betrayed, but do you not appreciate it if they exceed expectations? Humanities scholars think that is the case and they use the…

After 20 years of grueling research, unimaginably effective drugs to treat hepatitis C are hitting the market. They are so good that cure rates (aka sustained virological response, or SVR)—…

Some Ecuadorian tribes were famous for making mummified shrunken heads (click for the recipe) from the remains of their conquered foes.  Perhaps they got the idea from nature. Field work in the…

Richard Somerville and Susan Hassol have some recommendations for how to improve science communication. I've written about this before. In the Communicating Astronomy With The Public magazine I…

There are about 9,700 known species of grasshoppers in the world. Now there is one more, and it has beeen named  Grammy-award winning singer and Mexican activist Ana Lila Downs Sanchez. Locals…

Pollution is bad, right? To some animals, it's home. Thousands of shipping containers are lost from cargo vessels each year and many of them sink, never to be found again.  In February 2004, the…

Would reducing smog lead to higher earnings? Yes, say Columbia University professor of Environmental Health Science Frederica Perera  and colleagues. They correlate reduced air pollution to…