The Ashes

Feeling under the weather? If you’re sick of running to the drugstore and popping pills, these 10 inexpensive home remedies may be just the alternative you’re looking for. We reached out to the experts for non-pharmacological treatments that can help resolve your minor health ailments. From colds to insomnia, fatigue to indigestion, read on to [...]

Cells from flakes of skin have grown into living, breeding mice, through a bit of biotechnological wizardry. This feat helps confirm that reprogrammed adult cells, considered a potentially convenient source of stem cell therapies, share the shape-changing powers of embryonic stem cells. The goal was to create an animal made entirely from reprogrammed cells, and [...]

A desert plant has apparently figured out how to water itself. Ecologists had been puzzling over the desert rhubarb for years: Instead of the tiny, spiky leaves found on most desert plants, this rare rhubarb boasts lush green leaves up to a meter wide. Now scientists from the University of Haifa-Oranim in Israel have discovered [...]

Only two sizes of black holes have ever been spotted: small and super-massive. Scientists have long speculated that an intermediate version must exist, but they’ve never been able to find one until now. Astrophysicists identified what appears to be the first-ever medium-sized black hole, pictured in an artist’s rendition above, with a mass at least [...]

The enemy of our enemy may be our new partner in stopping a global health crisis.With World Malaria Day (April 25) around the corner, new discoveries suggest our greatest allies in the fight against malaria may be the mosquitoes themselves. Although saddled with a lousy public image, mosquitoes have immune systems that actually kill 80 [...]

An atomic line filter (ALF) is an advanced optical band-pass filter used in the physical sciences for filtering electromagnetic radiation with precision, accuracy, and minimal signal strength loss. Atomic line filters work via the absorption or resonance lines of atomic vapors and so may also be designated an atomic resonance filter (ARF). The three major [...]

A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a variation of a ramjet distinguished by supersonic combustion. At higher speeds, it is necessary to combust supersonically to maximize the efficiency of the combustion process. Projections for the top speed of a scramjet engine (without additional oxidiser input) vary between Mach 12 and Mach 24 (orbital velocity). The [...]

The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle and Galen [...]

May 19, 2009—Meet “Ida,” the small “missing link” found in Germany that’s created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins. In a new book, documentary, and promotional Web site, paleontologist Jorn Hurum, who led the team that analyzed the 47-million-year-old fossil seen above, suggests Ida [...]

Teotihuacan is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas. Apart from the pyramidal structures, the archaeological site of Teotihuacan is also known for its large residential complexes, the so-called “street of the dead”, and its colorful well-preserved murals. Teotihuacan was, at [...]