Scientists are engineering microscopic viruses to help in the building of smaller, lighter power supplies for a variety of devices.

There may be a strange, slithering invasion coming from the South. Big snakes like anacondas, boa constrictors and pythons now live in the wilds of southern Florida. Although not originally native to the United States, some of them are now being born there. Most were people’s pets (or the offspring of pets) that got too big, leading the owners to release them into the wild. So far, the snakes have stayed put. But there’s nothing stopping them from moving farther north. According to a new study by government scientists, some species of large snakes could live comfortably in a large part o...

It sounds like a science experiment designed by Willy Wonka: Take a lot of junk food, feed it to some rats, and see what happens. Scientist Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute and his team did just that. But their science experiment was no fiction. They had a serious goal: to try to understand how parts of the brain play a role in obesity. (Obesity is the condition of being very overweight, which has been linked to a variety of health problems.) The scientists observed that the more junk food the rats ate, the more they wanted to eat—a behavior very similar to that of rats add...

View a video of fruit flies displaying unusual courtship behavior. View power words for this article. Fruit flies linger over a bowl of rotting fruit. To untrained eyes, the flies may look like a swarming nuisance, but scientists have found that flies’ swoops and buzzes are ways to send signals through the crowd. Another, less obvious way these insects communicate is through chemical signals called pheromones. (It’s easy to think of these chemical signals as being similar to smells.) Scientists have long known that pheromones may play an important role in reproduction — certa...

What does fizz taste like? In bubbly beverages like soda or champagne, tiny bubbles give the drink a lift — and have a distinct taste. Scientists have long wondered how we taste these bubbles. In a new study on mice, scientists have connected that fizzy-taste sensation to the ability to taste sourness. Scientists previously thought the taste of bubbles comes from the bubbles bursting on the tongue — but that idea may have to change, says Charles Zuker. A neuroscientist, or a scientist who studies the brain and nervous system, Zuker is now at Columbia University in New York. He and his te...

What if the solution to one problem causes other problems down the road? That may be the case in the ongoing struggle to fight the flu. Flu season is almost here, which means more and more people may be taking Tamiflu in the months ahead. Tamiflu is a popular anti-flu drug that treats both seasonal flu strains and the new H1N1 flu, an unpredictable disease better known as swine flu. But this increased use of Tamiflu may be introducing new problems. A team of Japanese scientists recently studied three rivers in Japan and found them to be contaminated with Tamiflu’s active ingredient, oselta...

Her scientific name is Ardipithecus ramidus, and scientists call her Ardi for short. She is ancient — her bones are 4.4 million years old — and is making scientists think about the distant past in a whole new way. Ardi is an example of an extinct species that may help scientists understand how human beings evolved the way we did. She is a hominid, which means she belongs to the same evolutionary family as people. It’s not clear whether Ardi was a direct ancestor of humans. Scientists have just published more than a dozen studies on Ardi’s species — and this is just the first wave...

About 4 billion people use cell phones, but are they safe? Keep listening—scientists around the world are exploring this question right now. In the meantime, governments are suggesting that people try to limit exposure to radiation from the devices. “Better safe than sorry,” says Siegal Sadetzki, a physician in Israel who studies the health risks of cell phones. Cell phone users can cut down on radiation exposure by only using the phone when the signal is strong. Another way to reduce exposure is to keep some distance between the phone and the ear. The phones work by changing the soun...

This just in: There’s water on the moon. Scientists have suspected as much for several years, but a group of recent studies give the best evidence yet. Earlier studies suggested the water was frozen in icy patches at the moon’s poles, but these new studies suggest there’s a tiny amount of water all over the moon, more than scientist had believed. The new studies have found signs of water both on the moon’s surface and in its interior. “This is the first detection of water on the moon and we see it all over, not just in the polar regions,” says Roger N. Clark of the U.S. Geologica...

For a pair of squirrel monkeys named Sam and Dalton, the world recently got more colorful. Male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind, which means they have trouble seeing those colors. But now, thanks to an experiment by scientists at the University of Seattle, Sam and Dalton see things differently—they seem to be able to see red and green. Animals (including people) are able to see different colors of light thanks to proteins in the eye. Proteins are important building blocks of cells, and different kinds of proteins serve specific purposes in a living organism. When an imp...

How old are the objects you can see in the sky? The brightest star in the night sky, Sirius , is believed to be about 200-300 million years old. The Sun and Moon are much older—about 4.5 billion years old. New pictures taken by a telescope in space show ancient galaxies that blow those numbers away. Some of these images show galaxies that are about 13 billion years old. The universe itself is only about 13.7 billion years old, so these galaxies formed when the universe was very young. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is part of one team tha...

Among dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex may be the most familiar. At 20 feet tall and twice that long from snout to tail, this beast was no doubt a scary sight to any smaller animals that crossed its path. It had a large head, strong legs and tiny arms, and T. rex was one of the fiercest dinosaurs to roam the Earth from about 90 million to 65 million years ago.A newly found dinosaur skeleton, discovered in China, look a lot like the remains of a T. rex. Its head was large, compared to its body, and its strong legs suggest the animal was quick on its feet. Despite these similarities, there’s a ver...

Halloween is right around the corner, which means scary movies are playing at the theater and trick-or-treaters are shopping for costumes. This year, there’s no need to go looking for spooky thrills and chills in graveyards — inspiration can come from nature. Consider the case of fire ants and phorid flies. Fire ants are venomous pests that roam the southeastern United States and pack a powerful punch with their bite. Originally, fire ants came from South America, but they accidentally travelled to the United States in ships years ago and their populations grew quickly without any natural...

In the chair at the dentist’s office, nitrous oxide is better known as “laughing gas”—it’s used to knock out patients during uncomfortable procedures. That’s not the only place where laughing gas shows up, however. Nitrous oxide from Earth also ends up in the stratosphere, that portion of our atmosphere about 5 to 30 miles overhead. Up there, it’s no laughing matter. Nitrous oxide in the stratosphere is already dangerous for life on our planet, and according to a new study, it may become even more dangerous in the near future. To understand why nitrous oxide is dangerous, it�...

In the video game Tetris, players try to pack as many shapes as possible into a small space. According to a new study, that’s not all they’re doing: Scientists found a connection between playing Tetris and the size of part of the brain. It sounds like a joke, but the study uses serious science. A team of three researchers from Canada and the United States scanned the brains of 15 adolescent girls, aged 12-15, who played Tetris. The scans showed that after 3 months of playing the block-stacking game, gray matter in the girls’ brains was thicker. (Gray matter is the wrinkly mixture of bra...