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Image courtesy of iStockphoto/Neurostockimages Eager eaters know that gulping a Slurpee or inhaling a sundae can cause that brief seizing sensation known in the not-so-technical literature as “brain freeze” or “ ice cream headache .” [More]

By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazine Researchers have identified a gene that makes some strains of an antibiotic-resistant bacterium more virulent, and have found that the gene is becoming more prevalent. Epidemics of infection with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) come in waves. [More]

A series of graduate student conversations with leading women biologists, at the Women in Science Symposium at Cornell April 2-3. [More]

Objectively time is constant. A minute is a minute

The list of human impacts on the planet is a long one. We move more earth and stone than all the world's rivers

I spent the first day of Experimental Biology 2012 at the Behavioral Pharmacology Meeting, where people who focus on drugs and behavior came to share the latest and greatest findings.

The morning of my Board exams, my mother packed me a lunch comprising of seedless grapes, two Greek yogurts, a cheese sandwich, a bag of pistachio nuts, two cappuccinos, a diet coke, chocolate-covered coffee beans and a pouch of pretzels. Mum, this isn t the Hunger Games, I joked

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(Phys.org) -- Can light self-bend into an arc? Can shape-preserving optical beams truly bend along a circular path? A confident answer emerged in this week’s Physical Review Letters.

Two years ago, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform led to the spilling of almost five million barrels of oil in just a handful of months. I wrote the following post in June of that year, two months after the spill began.

With instruments offering “ tantalizing hints ” in support of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle thought to endow matter with mass, we stand at a singular moment in time for physics.

Researchers predict a new type of lithium battery under development could give an electric car enough juice to travel a whopping 800 kilometers before it needs to be plugged in again--about 10 times the energy that today's lithium ion batteries supply. It is a tantalizing prospect --a lighter, longer-lasting, air-breathing power source for the next generation of vehicles--if only someone could build a working model. Several roadblocks stand between these lithium–air batteries and the open road, however, primarily in finding electrodes and electrolytes that are stable enough for rechargeable battery chemistry.

Two years ago, 11 men lost their lives as a backlash of gas exploded into the night from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. In the ensuing months, roughly 5 million barrels of oil and more than 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas spewed into the ocean from the Macondo well more than a kilometer underwater. It took the combined efforts of the U.S.

By Richard A. [More]