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Eshel Ben-Jacob is interested not only in the genomes of the bacteria he studies but also in their personalities. He compares many to Hollywood celebrities. “On the one hand, we admire them, but on the other hand, we think that they are stupid,” says Ben-Jacob, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

When the internet first got kicking, some scholars of democracy and civil society thought that online discussions could create what they called a "conversational democracy”: an ongoing town hall without bricks and mortar. But the internet may not be as democratic as they'd imagined, according to a study in the journal Communication Research .

Sprawl isn't just eating up the countryside--it's also blocking the breezes that would otherwise clear out air pollution. That's according to a new study of Houston from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research

It sounds like something out of a comic book or a science fiction movie – a living laser – but that is exactly what two investigators at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed.

In recent years, UC Santa Barbara scientists showed that they could reproduce a basic superconductor using Einstein's general theory of relativity. Now, using the same theory, they have demonstrated that the Josephson junction could be reproduced. The results are explained in a recent issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. And you shouldn’t judge a species by its place of origin

We know that at the heart of at least two ocean basins--the North Pacific and the North Atlantic--tiny plastic fragments the size of confetti or smaller are accumulating on the sea surface by the tens of thousands, the remnants of discarded grocery bags, cups, bottles and other waste. Last year a group of researchers publishing in the journal Science reported a mystery: during a 22-year survey of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic, the scientists saw no increase in the amount of plastic, despite a surge in annual global plastic production from about 75 million to 245 million metric tons over the same period. Where was it going

The quadratic equation may have instilled horror in many of us. But for some five to seven percent of the population even basic math--like the concept of the numbers five and seven--causes anxiety. You may never have heard of the disorder called dyscalculia, yet it’s as common as dyslexia, according to research in the journal Science .

In a point mutation, a single letter of the genetic code changes to another letter. When a protein gets made from that new code, it’ll be slightly different from usual. But new research finds that it may be fairly common for multiple mutations to happen in DNA simultaneously

The discount-of-the-day site filed its papers today to become a publicly traded company. It's official.

From a laptop warming a knee to a supercomputer heating a room, the idea that computers generate heat is familiar to everyone. But theoretical physicists have discovered something astonishing: not only do computational processes sometimes generate no heat, under certain conditions they can even have a cooling effect

How patents can hurt innovation, Google launches Offers, Greek islands for sale, Airbnb's soaring valuation, and more. Do patents hurt entrepreneurship?

While developing a book about the space-time continuum, Ellen Dudley was inspired to create an innovative book binding technique. The "aha" moment: At an event for the American Book Packagers Association in 2007, an editor challenged the audience to develop a bookbinding technique that had not been seen.

Lions roaming the savannah are a staple of nature documentaries. But the millions of little lions that live in our homes and neighborhoods also lead fascinating lives. We know more about those lives now, because a two-year-long study used radio-transmitters to track cats at the southern edge of the cities of Champaign and Urbana in Illinois.

Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature today.