Many people are against body piercing for whatever reason, but US scientists have been working on a way of using tongue studs to help paralysed people move their motorised wheelchairs, making a lot of anti-piercers bite their tongues. Researchers from the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, the Rehabilitation Institute in Chicago, and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a magnetic tongue piercing and ...

Children and their noisy toys: a new study suggests that the drum kit or piano lessons your child wanted may not be such a frivolous thing. According to scientists at Northwestern University in the US, children who are learning to play a musical instrument are giving their brain a boost that lasts long into adult life, preventing cognitive decline when they get older. The researchers conducted a study of 44 ...

A solar eclipse occurred earlier this month, drawing millions of people to gaze at the sky. Partial and complete solar eclipses occur on average about twice a year, but this one was different. This one was a hybrid. The moon’s distance to Earth varies, so there are different kinds of solar eclipse, depending on how far away the moon is. During a total eclipse, the moon is closer to us, making it look bigger ...

A creature of contradictions, the platypus looks like the strange combination of an otter, beaver, duck, and many more besides, has venomous spurs on its legs and is one of only five types of mammal to lay eggs, with the other four being species of echidnas, known as spiny anteaters. It was thought that the peculiar-looking animal only had a very basic evolutionary path, but now Australian scientists from U ...

Scientists from the University of Nottingham have developed a new test that identifies seven out of the ten known types of breast cancer. Funded by the charity Breast Cancer Campaign, the new check could lead to more accurate testing for women, and doctors will be able to modify treatment depending on the patient’s cancer type. The findings are published in the British Journal of Cancer. Last year, scientis ...

Gold grows on trees! Well, although scientists have confirmed that gold has indeed been found in some plants, it is not the fruit of the plant but rather the poison. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) made the revolutionary discovery of traces of gold in the leaves and branched of eucalyptus trees, in the Kalgoorlie region of Western Australia. The researchers say that ...

Around 68,000 new cases of heart failure are diagnosed in the UK each year, and now an operation has just performed for the first time in the UK that can improve the function of failing hearts - while they are still beating. Heart failure doesn’t mean your heart is just going to stop, or you are imminently going to have a heart attack; it just means that your heart working as well as it is meant to. Usually ...

Marmosets are considered the most primitive of the monkeys because they lack even the ability to change their facial expressions, but marmosets may be more polite than humans when it comes to courteous conversation. Scientists conducted a study which involved recording pairs of marmosets calling to each other from opposite sides of a curtain. The results showed that each animal would wait for five seconds f ...

Have you ever thought about becoming a blood or bone marrow donor? A new campaign was launched in Wales this week with the aim of raising awareness for bone marrow donation. Bone marrow is the tissue inside our bones with the important purpose of producing blood cells: red blood cells that carry oxygen around our bodies, white blood cells that help to fight off infections, and platelets to clot our blood an ...

It’s raining diamonds! Scientists say the little shiny rocks of highly pressurised carbon, which are both highly rare and highly expensive, are falling out of the sky. But if you want to get your hands on them, it’s a hundreds-of-millions-of-miles-long trek. Sadly, the diamond rain is not falling on Earth, but on Jupiter and Saturn. Dr Kevin Baines from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr Mona Delits ...