When the scientific establishment gets involved in partisan politics, surveys suggest, there are unintended consequences – especially for conservatives.
You would need to drink over a thousand bottles of red wine per day to get the amount of resveratrol - the compound said to have many health benefits - needed to even have an effect.
Scientists are working on a new method to cure cancer and have shown they can genetically program certain bacteria to invade the tumour cells of cancerous mice.
If you’re a teetotaller, your friends have likely tried to convince you to taste red wine by swearing on its multiple health benefits. These benefits have been credited to a compound found in red wine…
Earlier this week the publisher Macmillan announced (in somewhat breathless prose) that subscribers to 49 of its Nature journals would be able to share links to the full text of articles that would otherwise…
Great tits are opportunistic copycats. Entire populations can be found performing the same arbitrary behaviour simply because birds copy one another, following a fashion. And it’s this behaviour, reported…
The intimate act of copulation is old – very old. In fact, it first evolved in ancient armoured placoderm fishes called antiarchs 385 million years ago. Fossils of the antiarch Microbrachius dicki show…
Plate tectonics – the large-scale movement of Earth’s lithosphere or outer layers – started around three billion years ago, but how those movements started was a bit of a mystery – until today. With colleagues…
Millions of asteroids of all shapes and sizes are littered throughout the inner solar system. In the past three decades, scientists have spotted as many as 500,000 but many more remain unseen. Many of…
In 1987, my father, a scientist at the US National Institute of Health, killed himself after a member of his lab committed scientific fraud and he got caught up in the investigation. So I found the news…
There are lots of medicines available to help with the symptoms of schizophrenia. Some are a bit more effective than others. Some have side effects that make them better suited to particular patients…
Bovine tuberculosis is a major problem in the UK: in 2013 around 8m cattle were tested and 32,000 slaughtered at a cost of an estimated £100m, including compensation – a huge economic burden that makes…
Over the past few months, a lot of attention has been paid to the potentially strong El Niño event brewing in the Pacific Ocean. But there is also the potential for an emerging climate phenomenon in the…