UC Davis

When it comes to keeping things cold, ice cubes are hard to beat … although the things do melt. Scientists have set about addressing that limitation, with reusable water-based "jelly ice cubes" that hold their shape at all temperatures.

It may seem like a basic color, but blue is actually rather rare in the natural world. That complicates the search for natural blue food colorings, but now a team of scientists has found a promising candidate hiding in red cabbage.

Cattle are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to their methane-loaded burps. A detailed new study has found more evidence that feeding cows a small seaweed supplement can greatly reduce their methane emissions.

In April 2020, a bull calf named Cosmo was born to a team of scientists. This probably wouldn’t normally be news except that this particular bouncing baby boy had his genome edited as an embryo, to make him more likely to produce male offspring.

A new method for determining the sex of human remains based on proteins extracted from tooth enamel has proven more reliable than those based on DNA or bone anatomy.

A study from scientists at the University of California, Davis, has found unpasteurized milk, commonly known as raw milk, holds large volumes of antimicrobial-resistant genes which can swiftly spawn dangerous bacteria when left at room temperature.

Many readers are likely already familiar with the oximeters that measure blood oxygen levels via the patient's finger. Well, scientists have now developed a device that works on the same principle, but it can be non-invasively used on unborn fetuses.

Presently, in order to check the level of opioid drugs in a person's bloodstream, a blood sample must be taken. Things may soon be getting much less invasive, however, as scientists have now developed a breath test that does the job.

Archaeologists have found ancient tools at a dig site in Mongolia, indicating that humans were on the scene about 45,000 years ago, which is much earlier than current evidence suggests. There’s also a chance that the site is one spot where our ancestors mingled with the mysterious Denisovans.

Our bodies aren't great at regeneration. Other creatures have mastered this skill though, and now scientists at the University of California Davis (UC Davis) and Harvard have sequenced the RNA transcripts for the immortal hydra and figured out how it manages to do just that.

While exploring the “dark heart” of the human genome, geneticists have now found some of the most ancient pieces of DNA, inherited from Neanderthals and an as-yet-unknown human relative, which may be affecting our sense of smell to this day.

A recent study indicated that fewer horseflies land on mannequins with stripes painted onto them. The research was inspired by observations that zebras also tend not to be bothered much by flies. A separate study now offers an explanation as to why that's the case.