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A team of physicists at UC Santa Barbara has seen the light, and it comes in many different colors.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have long known that butterfly wings produce their iridescent colors by bouncing light around and between tiny ridges in structures made of chitin. More recently they’ve discovered that the chitin material in their wings also expands when struck by infrared radiation which causes a change in its refraction index, converting it to visible light. Now, by adding a layer of carbon nanotubes to the wing material, the researchers have found they are able to increase the amount of heat absorbed.

Jurassic meow? Scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, have come up with a novel idea for possibly saving endangered big cats: reproduce them in the lab.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a degree in medicine, so I would expect that he’s had some rudimentary biology education at some point in his life.

What would be a case for the repair shop for a car engine is completely normal for a micro engine. If it sputters, this is caused by the thermal motions of the smallest particles, which interfere with its running

A team of scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has found that increasing the amount of lithium coating in the wall of an experimental fusion reactor greatly improves the ability of experimentalists to contain the hot, ionized gas known as plasma. Adding more lithium also enhances certain plasma properties aiding the reaction, the researchers found.

Photos taken by the researchers show plasma arcs up to 60 meters long casting an eerie blue glow over buildings and trees at the High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Men who don't have children may be at increased risk of dying from heart disease , a new study says. Childless men in the study had a 17 percent higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease than fathers, the researchers said

A few dozen nanoseconds, an imperceptibly slim interval in everyday life, can make all the difference in experimental physics. A European physics collaboration made a stunning announcement September 23, after having clocked elementary particles called neutrinos making the underground journey from a lab in Switzerland to one in Italy

Pity our neighbors to the north.

The little black boxes in airplanes provide useful information after a crash has taken place. Now researchers have devised a way to use black box info from planes that do not crash--to help prevent accidents from ever happening. Some airlines already use a program that checks 88 flight parameters in the black box.

Plants need water to live, but exactly how much? Scientists have built a simulator to figure out how to far we can push crops before they die of thirst, in preparation for a hotter climate. It's a research project that seems particularly fitting for this year, when Texas has suffered (and continues to suffer) through the worst drought year on record.

A new process for converting plants to oil can use plants that we don't also want for food, opening up new possibilities for a future where the fields with amber waves are what power our cars. When Texas prospectors first hit oil gushers atop Spindletop Hill in 1901, it seemed like the Oil Age would go on forever.

Highly technical scientific debates are usually hashed out behind closed doors--in labs, in subscription-based journals, in the hallways at conferences attended only by a few specialized researchers. But in May the rest of us saw three real academic arguments playing out in public, largely via Twitter, blogs and wikis

Self-control--the ability to regulate our attention, emotions and behaviors--emerges in childhood and grows throughout life, but the skill varies widely among individuals. Past studies have reported that self-control is partially inherited and partially learned and that those with less self-control are more likely to be unemployed, en