Have you ever spent the better part of a summer afternoon watching water bugs in a pond, or ants on a sidewalk? Well, the guys at Science Channel have – it’s the sort of thing they live for – and lucky for us they’re willing to share their obsession. Here are their Top 10 Weird [...]

The European Union (EU) has announced that it plans to back a proposed ban on international trade in Atlantic Bluefin tuna when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) holds its triennial conference in Qatar from Mar 13 – March 25. Bluefin tuna is “highly sought after as a delicacy,” and in January 2010 [...]

Your grocery card may be able to do a lot more than get you that 2 for 1 special for the week. For the first time, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control successfully used shoppers’ cards to track purchases and were able to trace a salmonella outbreak to a Rhode Island company that makes salami. The [...]

If we reconstruct the earth’s recent climate history we find a repeating series of cold, glacial and warm, interglacial periods. From the climate record we know that interglacial periods appear every 100,000 years or so and last for an average of 10,000 years. The last glacial period – the Weichselian – ended about 15,000 years [...]

The electricity you use in your home creates carbon emissions at a coal-burning plant somewhere else. And that toy you just bought for your dog, and your tablecloth, and your cell phone? Those were made at factories that were producing carbon emissions as well. Researchers at Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology added up those [...]

Dr Andrew Westphal, University of California, Berkeley, and his team, are “cautiously excited” that they have identified two interstellar dust grains, the building blocks of stars and planets. The grains were collected by the NASA Stardust probe as part of its seven-year mission; a 4.8 billion kilometre (2.9 billion mile) interplanetary voyage through the interstellar [...]

Jacob Bleacher and his colleagues from NASA’s Goddard Space Center recently presented research results which suggest that flowing lava can carve or build paths and channels that closely resemble those formed by water, and concluded that at least some of the channels seen on the surface of Mars were formed by lava, not by ancient [...]

In November, the government of Japan started a program to recover precious and rare metals from discarded cell phones. And, according to the Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), by the time the program ended last week, they had recovered “22 kilograms of gold, worth 70 million yen (about US$784,313); 79 kilograms of [...]