The federal government announced last year that it wants to see more collaboration between academia and industry. The government believes this will help “find solutions to real world problems and create jobs and growth”. But collaboration is not easy to achieve or sustain. Between 50% and 75% of all interorganisational collaborations fail. And failure is […]

From the cacophony of day care to the buzz of TV and electronic toys, noise is more distracting to a child's brain than an adult's, and new research shows it can hinder how youngsters learn

With all of the publicity about research breakthroughs, it is easy to forget that private companies rather than publicly funded research institutions are the centre of the innovation systems.

Smartphone apps are the latest tools to emerge from the intersection of health care and Silicon Valley, where tech companies are also working on new ways of bringing patients and doctors together online

The move to make cancer treatments gentler for children has paid a double dividend: More kids are surviving than ever before

Some discoveries fade into obscurity, while other blaze a new trail the moment they’re published.

At the University of Virginia, a space is given to the scientific investigation of strange phenomena that challenge currently accepted scientific assumptions. Such phenomena include extrasensory perception (such as telepathy), apparitions and deathbed visions, poltergeists, experiences of persons who come close to death and survive (usually called near-death experiences), out-of-body experiences, and claimed memories of previous lives.

Some elements of out-of-body experiences can be traced to the brain, but not all, say researchers.

Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, as an indicator species, are the windows into the health of their ecosystem, the ocean. But how can scientists pull data from mobile, fast moving, seafaring creatures in their element? And what would a half-century of human impact, from farm and pharmaceutical runoff, to urban sprawl and industrialization look like in marine […]

How much thought do you put into finding the nearest restaurant, getting directions, or learning something new?

Political Science An awful lot of political science majors are throwing around the word science a little too loosely these days. As if they somehow own it. Perspective I was a scientist. With the lab coat and the laboratory notebook, the whole deal. I was designing and carrying out experiments and such. I know intimately […]

Declared dead, a man allegedly viewed the hospital in spirit, returning to tell what he saw. His surgeon was unable to provide a conventional explanation.

“And suddenly I was ejected from my body and I wasn’t angry anymore,” she said. A blaze of light appeared and she felt an energy pervading everything, including herself.

Obesity continues to be a growing global epidemic. According to the World Health Organization, 1.4 billion people in the world are overweight and nearly half of them are considered obese as their BMI is over 30. People who are overweight are at increased risk of diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, neurological diseases, and even cancer. As […]

From brewing whiskey to mixing perfume, turns out there's a whole lot more to space travel than you thought.

Whether someone is crazy or not can be officially determined by a manual widely used to diagnose mental illness. If psychologists were to all take the extreme materialist perspective and label any belief in a spiritual side of existence as delusion, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists alike could all be considered mentally ill.

SYDNEY—California has become the newest region to ban lightweight plastic bags, joining four states and territories in Australia in restricting the use of disposable plastics. The move comes as Australian researchers study the toxicity of plastics, which are polluting the marine environment at a molecular level. The Californian ban was signed into law on Sept […]

In some cases, what out-of-body experiencers have seen can be verified; researchers then try to determine whether the person could have seen these events or objects through normal means, without having left the body.

The International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS) 2014 Conference in Newport Beach, California, brought together people who report having these profound experiences, as well as scientists who have often dedicated many years to studying them.  Near-death experiences (NDEs) often include, but aren’t limited to, the sense of leaving one’s physical body, being able to look […]

You can't easily produce a near-death experience in a laboratory—or at least not without some serious ethical issues. There are, nonetheless, some methods for studying this phenomenon.