New evidence gathered by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury solves an apparent enigma about Mercury's evolution.  The data indicate the tiny planet closest to the sun, only slightly larger…

The agave's claim to fame is as the plant from which the distilled adult beverage Tequila, named after the nearby town that made it famous, is produced. But that may change. A sweetener created from…

Colon cancer incidence rates have dropped sharply - 30 percent in the U.S. in the last 10 years, among adults 50 and older. The drop has been attributed to the widespread uptake of colonoscopy, with…

It's hard to imagine how plants, one of nature's greatest successes, could be improved, but nanobionic plants which enhance the photosynthetic function of chloroplasts isolated from plants for…

Leftover cigarette smoke clings to walls and furniture and could pose a far more serious threat, according to a presentation at the National Meeting&Exposition of the American Chemical Society (…

Bisphenol A (BPA) is currently banned from baby bottles so the search is on for alternatives.  Lignin, the compound that gives wood its strength, from waste in paper manufacturing could be…

Did our two Viking landers find life on Mars in 1976? Astonishingly, thirty seven years later, we still haven't sent anything to Mars able to answer this question for sure.  None of our…

Cosmologically speaking, 'near' does not mean what it means colloquially. After last week's "Cosmos" show, astronomers were chuckling at the representation that space was some sort of asteroid-laced…

Jonathan Eisen and Darlene Cavalier get a nice shout-out in the Sacramento Bee today, for their work gathering microbes for an experiment in space. The journalist says it was love of science, blah,…

Researchers from University College Londonand Cambridge University says have found evidence of a specialized mechanism for spatial self-awareness that combines visual cues with body motion - …