
Plant viruses: from crop pathogens to key players in bio-nanotechnology
Dec 23, 2015 03:54 am UTC| Science
Plant viruses are sub-microscopic parasites that have been studied primarily because they cause devastating diseases in crop plants. But in recent years, scientists have discovered theyre not just bad news; they also form...

After eight years, NASA's Dawn probe brings dwarf planet Ceres into closest focus
Dec 23, 2015 01:23 am UTC| Science
More than a thousand times farther from Earth than the moon, farther even than the sun, an extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition is taking place. NASAs Dawn spacecraft is exploring dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the...
A purported new mathematics proof is impenetrable – now what?
Dec 22, 2015 00:37 am UTC| Science
What happens when someone claims to have proved a famous conjecture? Well, it depends. When a paper is submitted, the journal editor will pass it off to a respected expert for examination. That referee will then scan the...

2015, the year that was: Science + Technology
Dec 21, 2015 00:15 am UTC| Technology Science
This year came and went almost as fast as NASAs New Horizons probe zipped past the distant dwarf planet, Pluto. Yet New Horizons managed to pack a lot into its flyby, revealing astounding images of Pluto that show it to be...

SpaceX Plans Launch Of Upgraded Falcon 9
Dec 17, 2015 05:12 am UTC| Technology Science
SpaceX scheduled a static fire test of the Falcon 9s first stage engines at Cape Canaveral, Florida on December 16. Florida Today reported that SpaceX lifted a Falcon 9 rocket vertical on its launch pad Wednesday, but as...
How a simple observation from the 1800s about patterns in big data sets can fight fraud
Dec 10, 2015 11:29 am UTC| Insights & Views Science
Benfords law was first mentioned by the American scientist Simon Newcomb in the 1880s, when he noticed that in books of tables of logarithms, the pages of numbers whose leading digit was 1 were more worn than the pages of...
In the driver's seat of evolution
Dec 08, 2015 02:26 am UTC| Insights & Views Science
Humans have had a profound influence over evolution; ours and the evolution of many other species. So much so today that we are without doubt in the drivers seat of evolution for many species, including our own. Weve...