Science

Propionates, salts of a short-chain fatty acid called propionic acid, are widely used in baked goods, animal feeds and artificial flavorings. Although generally recognized as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the metabolic effects of propionate consumption in humans were unclear until now. According to new research that …

Professor Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have proposed a new test for inflation, the theory that our Universe dramatically expanded in size in a fleeting fraction of a second right after the Big Bang. The team’s paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters. …

  Saturn has a lot of moons, but Titan is of particular interest to scientists for numerous reasons. It has a thick atmosphere, bodies of liquid on the surface, and weather patterns. Scientists from the University of Arizona studying the atmospheric processes on Titan report they happened upon a previously …

For scores of wild bee species, females and males visit very different flowers for food, according to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE. The bicolored striped-sweat bee (Agapostemon virescens), a male, on spotted knapweed in the Rutgers-owned Hutcheson Memorial Forest in Franklin Township, Somerset County. Image credit: …

The tenuous nitrogen atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto is predicted to ultimately collapse and freeze over. This high-resolution image of Pluto was taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015. Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, …

A team of geneticists from the John Innes Centre and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has produced the first high-quality genomic sequence for the Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis), one of the 50 fundamental herbs used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis). Image credit: Andrey Korzun / CC …

A team of researchers in the Netherlands has found that higher levels of body fat are associated with differences in the form and structure of the brain, including smaller volumes of gray matter. Overview of observed standardized regression coefficients (b values) for the associations between total body fat and fractional …

Two new species of the bird genus Zosterops (white-eyes) have been discovered in the forests of the Wakatobi Archipelago, Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Wakatobi white-eye. Image credit: Seán Kelly. White-eyes as a group have spread and speciated more rapidly than any other birds. They are adaptable, feeding on a wide variety …

An international team of paleontologists has found the exceptionally preserved fossilized remains of an enigmatic new type of crab, Callichimaera perplexa, which lived approximately 95 million years ago (mid-Cretaceous period) in what are now Colombia and the United States. Callichimaera perplexa. Image credit: Elissa Martin, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural …

The half-life of a process is the time after which half of the radioactive nuclei present in a sample have decayed away. Using the XENON1T dark-matter detector, a 1,300-kg vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1.5 km beneath the Gran …