Curiosity plays a big part in preschoolers` lives. A new study that explored why young children ask so many "why" questions concludes that children are motivated by a desire for explanation. ...

New research from Queen Mary, University of London and Harvard Medical School has revealed precisely why taking fish oils can help with conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. In a paper published in Nature October 28, researchers describe how the body converts an ingredient found in fish oils into another chemical called Resolvin D2 and how this chemical reduces the inflammation that leads to a var...

Just like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, kicking a football through goal posts can be an elusive task, according to Purdue University research. "People trying to kick field goals will see a much smaller goal after unsuccessful attempts," said Jessica K. Witt, an assistant professor of psychological sciences who studies perception in athletes. "But those who kicke...

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 jointly to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom; Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; and Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". The ribos...

One of nature’s most gripping feats of survival is now better understood. For the first time, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory observed the chemical changes in individual cells that enable them to survive conditions that should kill them. The team tracked the chemical changes in Desulfovibrio vulgaris, which is a single-cell bacteriu...

Forget the old folk tales about snakes hypnotizing their prey. The tentacled snake from South East Asia has developed a more effective technique. The small water snake has found a way to startle its prey so that the fish turn toward the snake`s head to flee instead of turning away. In addition, the fish`s reaction is so predictable that the snake actually aims its strike at the position where the ...

In the French cave of Arago, an international team of scientists has analyzed the dental wear of the fossils of herbivorous animals hunted by Homo heidelbergensis. It is the first time that an analytical method has allowed the establishment of the length of human occupations at archaeological sites. The key is the last food that these hominids consumed. For many years, the mobility of the groups o...

Iron supplements do not increase the likelihood of contracting malaria and should not be withheld from children at risk of the disease, despite World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines to the contrary, a new review by Cochrane Researchers suggests. "Based on our review, children should not be denied iron supplements, even if they are living in areas where malaria is prevalent," says le...

Analysis of the longest running ICSI programme in the United States has found reassuring evidence that babies born from frozen embryos fertilised via ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) do just as well as those born from frozen embryos fertilised via standard IVF treatment. The researchers also compared babies born as a result of cycles in which the women had additional hormone medication with...

How is it possible that you were not planning on going shopping, but that you still end up going and even return home with four new pairs of trousers? Apparently you really did want to go shopping but were not consciously aware of it. Dutch researcher Martijn Veltkamp has demonstrated that you can motivate people with subliminal messaging: quickly flashing words onto a screen without their noticin...