A couple of teaspoons of a fibre supplement, taken daily, has produced some exciting results that will help children with overweight or obesity maintain a healthier weight and prevent many diseases caused by obesity.

This is the first time a study using a prebiotic fibre was performed on children to improve their intestinal bacteria profile. The results were published this week in the high-impact journal Gastroenterology.

Tropical Storm Merbok formed in the South China Sea west of the Philippines on June 11 and made landfall east of Hong Kong, China on June 12. NASA measured the rainfall rates within the tropical storm early in its short two day lifetime.

Present-day Mars is a frozen desert, colder and more arid than Antarctica, and scientists are fairly sure it’s been that way for at least the last 3 billion years. That makes a vast network of water-carved valleys on the flanks of an impact crater called Lyot — which formed somewhere between 1.5 billion and 3 billion years ago — something of a Martian mystery. It’s not clear where the water came from.

The plant disease fire blight, caused by the bacterium Erwinia amylovora, is dreaded by fruit growers. It affects apple and pear trees and other plants in the rosacea family, and if a tree becomes affected it usually has to be cleared and burned.

Our society is in need of ammonia more than ever.

Chemical fertilizers, plastic, fibers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants in heat pumps, and even explosives all use ammonia as raw material. Moreover, ammonia has been suggested as a hydrogen carrier recently because of its high hydrogen content.

Without action, the supply of fresh water in Iqaluit will begin to dwindle by 2024 due to climate change and increased demand, research led by York University has found. 

“Extreme climates make the management of fresh water difficult, but add climate change to the mix, along with too few financial and human resources, and northern cities, such as Iqaluit could run out of fresh water,” said Andrew Medeiros of York University who led the research.

At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company eventually plans to build 10 to 20 “gigafactories” capable of producing both cars and lithium-ion batteries.

At Tesla’s annual shareholderTesla — now in the business of making electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels — is currently building its first gigafactoryoutside of Sparks, Nevada. That plant, which will be more than three times the size of New York City’s Central Park, will begin battery production this year. In 2018, the factory is expected to produce more lithium-ion batteries annually than were produced globally in 2013. The Nevada gigafactory is currently devoted to producing only batteries.

A team of European researchers is testing whether tiny artificial algae can help protect coral reefs in the Mediterranean Sea that are threatened by ocean acidification due to climate change. 

The small plastic structures are made of a non-toxic, highly elastic rubber, and are designed to mimic natural coralline algae. Like coral, coralline algae help form reef habitats for small invertebrates. 

Imagine wearing a device that continuously analyzes your sweat or blood for different types of biomarkers, such as proteins that show you may have breast cancer or lung cancer. 

Rutgers engineers have invented biosensor technology – known as a lab on a chip – that could be used in hand-held or wearable devices to monitor your health and exposure to dangerous bacteria, viruses and pollutants.

“This is really important in the context of personalized medicine or personalized health monitoring,” said Mehdi Javanmard, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Our technology enables true labs on chips. We’re talking about platforms the size of a USB flash drive or something that can be integrated onto an Apple Watch, for example, or a Fitbit.”

In a classic tale of science taking twists and turns before coming to a conclusion, two teams of researchers—one a group of theorists and the other, experimentalists—have worked together to solve a chemical puzzle that may one day lead to cleaner air and renewable fuel. The scientists' ultimate goal is to convert harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere into beneficial liquid fuel. Currently, it is possible to make fuels out of CO2—plants do it all the time—but researchers are still trying to crack the problem of artificially producing the fuels at large enough scales to be useful.

In a new study published the week of June 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers report the mechanics behind an early key step in artificially activating CO2 so that it can rearrange itself to become the liquid fuel ethanol. Theorists at Caltech used quantum mechanics to predict what was happening at atomic scales, while experimentalists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) used X-ray studies to analyze the steps of the chemical reaction.