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A 5000x magnification view of diatoms, a type of tiny algae. (Credit: from Jim Mikulak (The English Wikipedia) via Wikimedia Commons.) Scientists at Zhejiang University have recently published an improved method for removing arsenic from drinking water,…

Steven Brust’s advice on dragons – “always speak politely to an enraged dragon” – may find it’s way out of fantasy novels and into the real world if a group of Australian and British researchers is to be believed. The group recently published a paper in…

Reports this week have touted headlines such as “Ebola is not mutating as fast as scientists feared” and “Ebola virus in latest outbreak does not show unusual mutations.” These headlines are based on a report published in the journal Science last week…

In February, the journal Nature and its sister publications announced a new policy for their peer review process (the evaluation of submitted articles by experts in the field). The journal normally operates on the basis of single-blind peer…

Watch out, honey fans – populations of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, may be in decline, and we don’t really know why. Honey bees play a vital role in natural ecosystems as pollinators; it is estimated that a single bee can visit 2000 flowers in a day…

Fossilized remains of cyanobacteria thought to be among the first organisms on earth (Wikimedia Commons). How did life originate? This puzzle has been studied by scientists for hundreds of years. Authors of a new paper in Nature have made significant…

Rendering of the double helical structure of DNA [Image: Dna rendering/ynse under CC-BY licence]Recent advances in genetics have afforded the ability to precisely manipulate every letter of our genetic code.  Several world-renowned biologists, however,…

Although dark matter makes up 80% of all matter in the universe, physicists are still struggling to understand exactly what it is. This perplexity is largely due to the fact that dark matter is invisible and difficult to study directly, but a dwarf…

Ant feeding on honey [Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos under CC-BY license] Traits that exist along a continuum, such as height, size, and behavior, vary significantly from person to person. The genetic and environmental interactions that cause these…

You probably saw the photo of the dress that caused an uproar on the Internet a few weeks ago (1). You probably also formed a firm opinion about whether the dress was blue and black or white and gold. Some of you may even have worried that you were…