Science A GoGo

The Turkana Basin in Kenya, where the average daily temperature has been around 100 degrees for the past 4 million years, may have been the place where humans first began to walk upright...

Nearly 1-in-10 sleep center patients report sexsomnia incidents and researchers say there is an association between sexsomnia and recreational drug use...

Even after adjusting for factors such as age and socioeconomic status, researchers found that men with lower IQ scores were significantly more likely to have attempted suicide at least once - usually by taking an overdose of medication...

Frustration, the term used to describe a system's interacting components when they cannot settle into a state that minimizes each interaction, has been extremely difficult to study because even systems with few components have interactions so complex that they cannot be modeled effectively on even the most powerful computers. Now, however, a team of researchers has simulated frustration in a quantum system in a precisely controllable experimental arrangement. The breakthrough should provide new insights into a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism...

The slow-working, scatter-gun action of current antidepressants may become a thing of the past, thanks to new research that has identified the specific serotonin receptor that is linked to anti-depressive and anti-anxiety behavior...

Using genetic particles known as small interfering RNAs, scientists have halted the replication process of the deadly Ebola virus in monkeys; a breakthrough that the researchers say should be reproducible in humans...

For the first time, a team of geneticists has shown that there is a direct cause-and-effect link between a psychiatric disorder and the immune system, a discovery that could herald new treatments for mental illness...

An analysis of shark attacks in the US has found that attacks are most likely to occur on a Sunday, in less than 6 feet of water, during a new moon and involve surfers wearing black and white bathing suits...

A group of pathogens including a fungus and family of viruses may be working together to cause the decline in honeybees known as colony collapse disorder...

Researchers say that the bacterium

A hundred years after Albert Einstein said we would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles undergoing Brownian motion, a group of Texan physicists has done so...

Scientists have created the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome, a feat that will allow researchers to probe the basic machinery of life and to engineer custom-designed bacteria...

Supernova 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California's Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope, is a calcium-rich supernova that defies categorization, leading astronomers to speculate that it may hint at new and unusual physics...

Physicists have shown that the magnetic fields produced by lightning discharges have the same properties as transcranial magnetic stimulation, a technique used in psychiatry that can produce images of luminous shapes in the brain...

Smallpox immunization may confer protection against HIV, say researchers who suggest that the end of smallpox vaccination in the mid-20th century may have caused the rapid contemporary spread of HIV...

Participants in a financial simulation were inclined to throw caution to the wind if a female experimenter patted them on the back, whereas similar patting from a male researcher had no effect...

A team of scientists have programmed an autonomous molecular "robot" made out of DNA to start, move, turn, and stop while following a DNA track...

Astronomers have new evidence that a vast reservoir of hot, diffuse gas about 400 million light years from Earth could contain the "missing matter" of the universe...

Scientists have conducted the first study in which quantum entanglement has been examined and quantified in a real biological system...

A new study shows that individuals with the HLA B57 gene produce larger numbers of T cells that are cross-reactive, meaning they can attack HIV mutations that arise to escape activated killer T cells...