Until now, little has been understood about the mechanisms that allow us to determine when someone is 'too near' our personal space or too far away. A biologist has found dopamine levels in fruit flies can give us clues into humans' need for personal space.

Each year, some 2 million people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses are arrested for various crimes, inadvertently turning the US correctional system into the nation's primary provider of inpatient psychiatric care. But an eight-year study now offers a solution.

As genomic data production has ramped up over the past two decades and is being generated on various platforms around the world, scientists have worked together to establish definitions for terms and data collection standards that apply across the board. Researchers have now developed standards for the minimum metadata to be supplied with single amplified genomes and metagenome-assembled genomes submitted to public databases.

A common indicator of neurobiological disturbance among the elderly may also be associated with mortality, according to a new study.

Researchers predict and experimentally confirm that two-dimensional materials grown onto a cone allows control over where defects appear. These defects, called grain boundaries, can be used to enhance the materials' electronic, mechanical, catalytic and optical properties.

Exposure to environmental levels of triclocarban (TCC), an antibacterial chemical common in personal care products like soaps and lotions as well as in the medical field, can transfer from mother to offspring and interfere with lipid metabolism, new research shows.

Astronomers report that a lunar rock collected by NASA's Apollo 15 mission exhibits signs that it formed 1 to 2.5 billion years ago in the presence of a relatively weak magnetic field of about 5 microtesla. That's around 10 times weaker than Earth's current magnetic field but still 1,000 times larger than fields in interplanetary space today.

An innovative study demonstrates how decorations on ancient pottery can be used to discover new evidence for how groups interacted across large regions.

The color of T-shirts people wear affects escape behavior in western fence lizards, according to a new study.

Human bones may have been engraved as part of a cannibalistic ritual during the Paleolithic period, according to a new study.

Air pollution policy reduces the extent to which population growth in metropolitan areas results in increased pollution emissions without disrupting the economic growth from this urbanization, new research shows.

New research indicates that weather conditions in 45 US cities are indeed associated with Google searches about joint pain. But it might not be the association you'd expect. The findings suggest that people's activity level -- increasing as temperatures rise, to a point -- is likelier than the weather itself to spur online searches about knee and hip pain, the investigators say.

It is known that the sun's corona is roughly 100 times hotter than its photosphere -- the sun's visible layer. The reason for this mysterious heating of the solar coronal plasma, however, is not yet entirely understood. A research team in India has developed a set of numerical computations to shed light on this phenomenon, and present this week in Physics of Plasmas, analysis examining the role of chaotic magnetic fields in potential heating mechanisms.

Scientists working toward the elusive lithium-air battery discovered an unexpected approach to capturing and storing carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere. Using a design intended for a lithium-CO2 battery, researchers have developed a way to isolate solid carbon dust from gaseous carbon dioxide, with the potential to also separate out oxygen gas through the same method.

Engineers have developed dynamic windows that can switch from transparent to opaque or back again in under a minute and do not degrade over time. The prototypes are plates of conductive glass outlined with metal ions that spread out over the surface, blocking light, in response to electrical current.