Dinosaurs often are depicted with very long necks. Nowadays we have the giraffe with a long neck who seem to have evolved this feature due to the need to eat leaves higher up. So why and how the dinosaur with its long neck? Researchers say the how is helped by hollow neck bones. The largest…

Flowers are pretty and attractive for a variety of reasons. These all just means of communicating to likely pollinators. Flowers’ methods of communicating are at least as sophisticated as any devised by an advertising agency, according to a new study, published today in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol. However, for any…

NASA’s Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun. The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra (the general direction of the star Vega). The smallest planet, Kepler-37b,…

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an organic compound. It is a colorless solid that is soluble in organic solvents, but poorly soluble in water. Having two phenol functional groups, it is used to make polycarbonate polymers and epoxy resins, along with other materials used to make plastics. It is a controversial component of plastic bottles and…

There are big rocks waiting to fall onto the Earth one day. Not too often but they are there. As an asteroid roughly half as large as a football field — and with energy equal to a large hydrogen bomb — readies for a fly-by of Earth on Friday, two California scientists are unveiling their…

Myopia is commonly known as being nearsighted or shortsighted)and is a condition of the eye where the light that comes in does not directly focus on the retina but in front of it. This causes the image that one sees when looking at a distant object to be out of focus, but in focus when…

There is only so much fresh water in the world of the kind people need to drink to live. Recycled water, or gray water, is water that has been used for household activities such as taking showers or washing dishes. Then there is water that is a bit more dirty such as from the toilet.…

A red dwarf is a small and relatively cool star on the main sequence. Red dwarfs range in mass from a low of 0.075 solar masses (the upper limit for a brown dwarf) to about 50% of the Sun and have a surface temperature of less than 4,000 K. So they are not very impressive…

Coal is somewhat notorious for not being the cleanest of fuels. Similarly all combustion systems release a good deal of carbon dioxide. A new form of clean coal technology reached an important milestone recently, with the successful operation of a research-scale combustion system at Ohio State University. The technology is now ready for testing at…

Understanding the past is always useful in predicting the future. In this case, how climate fluctuates over time due to natural effects before and and his industry affected it. Tree-rings, ice-cores, and speleothems can all be used to reconstruct climate of the past millennia. But these records may be of local effects and not global…