Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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University of Iowa engineers are working on 3D printing technology with a long-term goal of printing a human pancreas.

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Strictly protected areas such as national parks and biological reserves have been more effective at reducing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest than so-called sustainable-use areas that allow for controlled resource extraction, two University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues have found.

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Conversion of large swaths of Brazilian land for sugar plantations will help the country meet its needs for producing cane-derived ethanol, but it also could lead to important regional climate effects, according to a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science.

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3D imaging reveals that marine plankton automatically adjusts swimming technique in dense viscosity, but only due to temperature changes, not pollution.

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Sniffing has been observed to also serve as a method for rats to communicate—a fundamental discovery that may help scientists identify brain regions critical for interpreting communications cues and what brain malfunctions may cause some complex social disorders.

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A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step closer to finding the birth certificate of a star that's been around for a very long time.The star could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, an obvious dilemma.

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Some of the world’s most threatened sharks and rays—ancient, cartilaginous fish species under severe pressure globally from over-fishing – need protection by CITES, which is meeting this week in Bangkok

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Cornell and Rutgers researchers report in the March issue of Oceanography that the severe loss of summertime Arctic sea ice – attributed to greenhouse warming – appears to increase the frequency of atmospheric blocking events like the one that steered Hurricane Sandy into the US Northeast.

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University of Adelaide researchers have found the answer to one of natural history’s most intriguing puzzles – the origins of the now extinct Falkland Islands wolf and how it came to be the only land-based mammal on the isolated islands – 460km from the nearest land, Argentina.

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UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists report the first successful blocking of tumor development in a genetic mouse model of an incurable human cancer.

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The gravitational field surrounding this massive cluster of galaxies, Abell 68, acts as a natural lens in space to brighten and magnify the light coming from very distant background galaxies. In this Hubble photo, the image of a spiral galaxy at upper left has been stretched and mirrored into a shape similar to that of a simulated alien from the classic 1970s computer game Space Invaders!

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Back in 2010, the ideas behind a squid’s sticky tendrils and Spiderman’s super-strong webbing were combined to create a prototype for the first remote device able to stop vehicles in their tracks. It worked, but that technology just got better.

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Scientist Joshua Pearce became a 3D printing fanatic when he found he could save thousands by making his own lab equipment. Now he's looking at even bigger savings through using old milk jugs as raw material.

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University of Chicago physicists have succeeding in creating a vortex knot—a feat akin to tying a smoke ring into a knot. Linked and knotted vortex loops have existed in theory for more than a century, but creating them in the laboratory had previously eluded scientists.

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MIT and Brookhaven Lab physicists measured fleeting electron waves to uncover the elusive mechanism behind high-temperature superconductivity.

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Physicists make the first direct measurements of the polarization states of light. Using a recently developed technique, their work both overcomes some important challenges of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle and also is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory.

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There is growing evidence that several million years ago the center of the Milky Way galaxy was site of all manner of celestial fireworks and a pair of astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Institute of Technology propose that a single event -- a black hole collision -- can explain all the “forensic” clues.

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The world’s shark populations are experiencing significant declines with perhaps 100 million – or more - sharks being lost every year, according to a study published this week in Marine Policy.

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World-renowned primatologist Patricia Wright co-authors a study that will be published online in the February 28 issue of Behavioral Ecology.

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Nova Southeastern U. Professor Jim Thomas leads international expedition in Papua New Guinea that finds new species of sea slugs, feather stars and amphipods, a shrimp-like animal.