A neat fix for ageing eyes could be tested in humans next year. The treatment, which involves replacing the contents of the lens in the eye with a soft polymer gel, could allow millions of people to throw away their reading glasses.

“At first, we see it being used as an improvement to current cataract surgery,” says Arthur Ho at the University of New South Wales, a key member of the Australian government’s multinational Vision Cooperative Research Centre (Vision CRC) that is working on

Our earliest ancestors probably behaved in a much more “human” way than most scientists have previously thought, according to a recent study that looked at early hominid fossils from Ethiopia

Previously skeptical, an Ohio State University anthropologist now supports the idea that the minimal size differences between male and female pre-hominids suggest that they lived in a more cooperative and less competitive society.

The evidence centers on the extent of sexual dimorphism – differ

It´s tricky, this weather business — predicting drought, floods, rain or snow, especially months in advance. But NASA scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., are working to take the guesswork out of long-term prediction.

“We´re researching methods to predict precipitation a season or more in advance,” said Dr. Bob Oglesby, a senior atmospheric scientist at the research center. The key, he said, is understanding how the atmosphere interacts with th

Multiple sensors on ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite have been used to peer beneath a vast pall of smoke above tropical Borneo and detect fire hotspots – known to add millions of tons of harmful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Fires occur often during the dry season on the South East Asian island of Borneo, but it isn’t only the forests that burn. Lowland tropical peat swamps are formed from layers of woody debris too waterlogged to fully decompose. Slowly deposited over thousands

High-level delegates from 30 countries and 22 international organisations agreed at the Earth Observation Summit held last Thursday in Washington to improve cooperation on Earth observation and to remove barriers to the exchange of information between countries and organisations.

ESA already carries out its Earth observation programmes in cooperation with other agencies or countries through mechanisms such as CEOS, the Committee of Earth Observation Satellites and IGOS-P, the Integrated Glo

The universe is gently fading into darkness according to three astronomers who have looked at 40,000 galaxies in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way. Research student Ben Panter and Professor Alan Heavens from Edinburgh University´s Institute for Astronomy, and Professor Raul Jimenez of University of Pennsylvania, USA, decoded the “fossil record” concealed in the starlight from the galaxies to build up a detailed account of how many young, recently-formed stars there were at different periods in the 1