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From Nature magazine [More]

Vampire spiders, as the name suggests, like blood. And they feast on blood-filled mosquitoes to get it.

Smooth wrinkles and sharply crumpled regions are familiar motifs in biological and synthetic sheets, such as plant leaves and crushed foils, say physicists Benny Davidovitch, Narayanan Menon and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but how a featureless sheet develops a complex shape has long remained elusive.

It s World Oceans Day today (in North Carolina it s No It s Not! Day), so the moment seemed opportune for a very brief followup on the Plugged-In post of a week or so ago about the NC state legislature considering a law that would make it all kinds of illegal for you to try to figure out what the ocean was likely to do in the next century.

Scientists who traveled to the Arctic on a NASA research cruise last summer were looking for signs of climate change. What they found was a secret world hidden beneath the region's cap of sea ice. [More]

The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--And How You Can Change Them [More]

Imagine a world without man-made climate change, energy crunches or reliance on foreign oil.

The ALBA Synchrotron Light Facility has begun to function as a research tool. Of the seven experimental beamlines scientists can use to analyse their samples, the first which has begun to work is the BOREAS line, addressed to studying materials through X-ray spectroscopy. The experiments are being conducted between 6 and 10 June with the aim of studying the magnetic behaviour of specific nanoparticles which improve the properties of superconductor tapes, so that they can transmit larger amounts of electricity more efficiently.

Day-Glo Velocirabbit / Bacteriograph of Albasaurus, E. coli genetically modified to express GFP Zachary Copfer Bioart at first seemed to be such a novelty. [More]

Deforestation in the Amazon has put nearly 100 bird species at greater risk of extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced (IUCN) on Thursday. The news comes in conjunction with the release of the 2012 update on the world’s bird species for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , data for which is compiled and updated every four years by conservation group BirdLife International . Among the species at risk in the Amazon are the now-critically endangered Rio Branco antbird ( Cercomacra carbonaria ), which was listed as “Near Threatened” just four years ago

Think donning an Armani knockoff or phony Prada only hurts the fashion industry? Take another look in the mirror By Dan Ariely* [More]

Rafflesia cantleyi , perhaps better known as the corpse flower for its pungent scent, steals everything from its host. Though each blossom can be in excess of three feet across, the massive buds cannot support themselves, and have no leaves, stalks or true roots

More than 40 percent of men in the U.S. will show signs of male-pattern baldness sometime between the ages of 18 and 49. But studies looking at the genomes of this group of men have failed to turn up a genetic cause, which makes a true cure seem an unlikely prospect.

A team of scientists who last year suggested neutrinos could travel faster than light conceded Friday that Einstein was right and the sub-atomic particles are -- like everything else -- bound by the universe's speed limit.

Stunning footage of comb jellies captured at the New England Aquarium in Boston.