Our planet is bombarded every second with a large number of chargeless, seemingly massless, particles that originate in nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun. They’re called neutrinos.

According to The Standard Solar Model – the most substantiated model of the sun – the sun should emit around three times more neutrinos than are actually measured on Earth. They are a source of great interest for scientists who seek to better understand elementary particles and the physics of the s

Proteins, it appears, have taken Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way” close to heart. A new study published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals how single proteins, each a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) long, fold to assume their final shape. It shows that even proteins having the same final shape achieve it by taking different routes.

Proteins are the fundamental components of all living cells. They start out as randomly shaped c

In at least one type of endeavor, humans can’t even begin to compete with their best friends. Dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs and explosives or to track down a crime suspect by smell. Why can’t we do the same? Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology propose an explanation for this ancient quandary.

All mammals, including humans, have about 1,000 genes encoding smell-detecting proteins, or olfactory recepto

A team of scientists from Cambridge University and Bristol University, led by Dr Naomi Langmore of the Australian National University, has found that some Australian birds are one step ahead of their British counterparts in their ability to avoid being victimized by cuckoos.

Cuckoos exploit other bird species by laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. Soon after hatching, the cuckoo chick kills host young by tipping them out of the nest. The foster parents then work hard to rear the i

OxLoc Ltd today announced the launch of the Asset Alert for monitoring condition and location of goods in transit and advising the customer of any problems by a text or e-mail alert. The autonomous tag is self powered with its own battery and can be located easily on an asset or container without expensive installation.

Asset Alert is aimed at Intermodel transportation, containers and wagons and uses a number of external sensors to detect conditions such as temperature, relative humidity an

Scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds will soon be able to study some of the most elusive particles known to man, thanks to a giant telescope under the sea that looks down towards the centre of the Earth rather than up into the sky.

Together with fellow scientists from across Europe they are building a telescope 2400m (one and a half miles) under the Mediterranean Sea to detect neutrinos. These tiny elementary particles hardly exist at all, having no charge and almost no m