With the boom in consumption of organic foods creating a pressing need for natural insecticides and herbicides that can be used on crops certified as "organic," biopesticide pioneer Pam G. Marrone, Ph.D., is reporting development of a new "green" pesticide obtained from an extract of the giant knotweed in a report scheduled for presentation here […]

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Spray yourself with a DEET-based insect repellent and the mosquitoes will leave you alone. But why? They flee because of their intense dislike for the smell of the chemical repellent and not because DEET jams their sense of smell, report researchers at the University of California, Davis.

Their groundbreaking findings will be published Monday, Aug. 18, […]

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Prince Charles usually speaks from the heart; and his latest outpouring on genetically modified crops is expressed in terms that are forthright even for him.

Judging by readers’ comments appended to the Daily Telegraph article outlining his position, he has struck a chord.
This should not be surprising. There are few, if any, such divisive subjects in […]

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Companies developing genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster "of all time", Prince Charles has warned.
GM crops were damaging Earth’s soil and were an experiment "gone seriously wrong", he told the Daily Telegraph.

A future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land, he said.
The government said it […]

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Researchers have discovered an unusual molecule that is essential to the atmosphere’s ability to break down pollutants, especially the compounds that cause acid rain.

It’s the unusual chemistry facilitated by this molecule, however, that will attract the most attention from scientists.
Marsha Lester, the University of Pennsylvania’s Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor, and Joseph Francisco, William E. […]

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If you’re a fan of habañero salsa or like to order Thai food spiced to five stars, you owe a lot to bugs, both the crawling kind and ones you can see only with a microscope. New research shows they are the ones responsible for the heat in chili peppers.

The spiciness is a defense mechanism […]

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Would you be surprised to learn that nine people died last year on the highway you take to work everyday? Or would you be shocked to see that six teenagers died within five miles of your home in fatal car accidents? With the help of the interactive maps developed by University of Minnesota researchers, you […]

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Cell phones—The new cigarettes?
There has been a raging debate over whether cell phones—or more specifically electromagnetic radiation that they emit—up a person’s cancer risk. The latest chapter: Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, this week warned consumers to limit exposure to cell phone radiation—and alerted parents to beware of possible effects […]

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A European research project has brought the dream of human-like robots closer to reality by creating a human-like arm and hand controlled by an electronic ‘brain’ modelled on the human cerebellum.

“Hollywood did a bad job for us,” says Patrick van der Smagt, the coordinator of SENSOPAC, an EU-funded project whose goal is to create a […]

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Your grandmother might have little in common with an astronaut, but both could benefit from a new device an MIT graduate student is designing to test balancing ability.

The iShoe insole could help doctors detect balance problems before a catastrophic fall occurs, says Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and […]

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