The prairie may appear to be a simple, rather plain scene at first glance. Gail Wilson knows better.

The tallgrass prairie teems with life. Fungi, plants and insects interact with each other in crucial ways scientists are trying to understand.

Wilson, a research associate in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University, David Hartnett, biology professor and director of the Konza Prairie Biological Station, and graduate student Abigail Kula, of Omaha, Neb., conducted a study sh

The kerosene that lights your heater or stove might be the same type of fuel powering the nation’s next space vehicle.

Kerosene — almost as common to American life as gasoline — is being considered as a fuel for two main engine candidates for a second generation reusable launch vehicle, now in development by the Space Launch Initiative. The Initiative is NASA’s technology development program to design a complete space transportation system with increased safety and reliability at a lower c

According to the World Health Organization, Tuberculosis ( Mycobacterium tuberculosis or TB) will kill two million people this year, with the projected number of new infections over the next twenty years reaching a billion. A rapidly moving, constantly mutating disease, TB’s effects are made worse by its ability to quickly react to new drug treatments, becoming resistant to antibiotics. Searching for a way to improve treatment, a group of researchers from the University of Tennessee developed

A strong and unexpected correlation between large numbers of howler monkeys and elevated counts of birds on islands created by a Venezuelan hydroelectric project has Duke University scientists looking for explanations. They say their discovery represents a prime example of the unexpected ecological insights that the science all-too-often yields.

The scientists’ working hypothesis is that excess plant-eating monkeys found on some of the smallest islands counterintuitively spur extra tre

After two years of stubborn persistence, scientists at Johns Hopkins have determined the 3-D structure of part of a protein called HER3, which should speed efforts to interfere with abnormal growth and cancer.

“It took us more than two years to interpret the data and get HER3’s structure,” says Dan Leahy, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biophysics in Hopkins’ Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. “Now that we have it, it might take only

Ironing must surely be one of the most dreaded household activities. Local entrepreneur Jonathan Nwabueze from Guildford, got so fed up with ironing and being delayed in the morning because of last minute ironing that he invented an iron that works without the need for a board.

His invention, featured on Tomorrow’s World on 24 July 2002, takes the drudgery out of ironing by using a heated vacuum to remove the creases from clothes. The 30-year old entrepreneur said “it can even smooth out wri