A study published today by Glasgow University scientists shows that finches given a poor diet briefly in early life become adults that can’t cope with ageing. Birds that had a low quality diet for just two weeks grew into adults with much lower levels of antioxidants in their blood, and such birds have shorter lives.

Antioxidants are a key part of the body’s defences against ageing; they reduce the damage caused by free radicals that are produced during normal metabolism. Animals cannot make

Scientists believe that they are an important step nearer to success in creating an artificial egg from the combination of the nucleus of a somatic cell and an oocyte which has had its DNA-carrying nucleus removed, a conference of international fertility experts heard today (Tuesday 1 July).

Dr Peter Nagy, from Reproductive Biology Associates, Atlanta, collaborating with the University of Connecticut, USA, told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual conference that

Maps of burning Spanish forests taken from space have been relayed to local fire fighters in near real-time. A successful demonstration campaign using Earth Observation data has taken place in Galicia – delivery time from raw orbital data to final value-added product in the hands of the user came to 92 minutes.

Around 45 000 forest fires start across Europe every year, with half a million hectares of woodland lost in the Mediterranean region alone. The European Commission estimates the cost

In less than a month, researchers at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and collaborators nationwide have built one of the world’s best systems to translate Hindi text into English and query Hindi databases using English questions.

This effort was part of the “Surprise Language” project, a test of the computer science community’s ability to create translation tools quickly for previously unresearched languages sponsored by the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA). The ex

NASA-funded researchers recently obtained the first complete proof of a 50-year-old hypothesis explaining how liquid metals resist turning into solids

The research is featured on the cover of the July issue of Physics Today. It challenges theories about how crystals form by a process called nucleation, important in everything from materials to biological systems.

“Nucleation is everywhere,” said Dr. Kenneth Kelton, the physics professor who leads a research team from Washing

Salk scientists have defined a new pathway that controls how plants flower in response to shaded, crowded conditions, and their findings may have implications for increasing yield in crops ranging from rice to wheat.

The study, published in the June 19 issue of Nature, was led by Salk professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Joanne Chory and Salk/Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow Pablo Cerdán. “The mechanism that leads to plants flowering early in respons