The Discovery Files

Using a common metal most famously found in self-cleaning ovens, Sossina Haile of CalTech University hopes to change our energy future. The metal is cerium oxide -- or ceria -- and it is the centerpiece of a promising new technology developed by Haile and her colleagues that concentrates solar energy and uses it to efficiently convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels.

The amount of time parents spend talking about numbers has a much bigger impact on how young children learn mathematics than was previously known, researchers at the University of Chicago have found.

The potential for a huge Pacific Ocean tsunami on the West Coast of America may be greater than previously thought, according to a new study of geological evidence along the Gulf of Alaska coast.

The balance of biodiversity within North American small-mammal communities is off balance from the last episode of global warming about 12,000 years ago that future climate change could push them past a tipping point, with repercussions up and down the food chain, say Stanford University biologists.

Monitoring everything from explosives to tainted milk, materials for use in creating sensors for detection devices have been developed by a University of Houston chemist and his team.

Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research from the University of Notre Dame and Boston College shows that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas.

A team at the University of Arizona has developed a new type of holographic "telepresence" that allows the projection of a three-dimensional, moving image without the need for special eyewear such as 3-D glasses or other auxiliary devices.

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, a roboticist from the University of Vermont created both simulated and actual robots that change their body forms while learning how to walk. And, over generations, the roboticist's simulated robots also evolved, spending less time in "infant" forms and more time in "adult" four-legged forms.

Some people always know how find their way around a building while others have difficulty doing so. Differences among people that include spatial skills, experience, and preferred strategies for way finding are part of what determines whether people get lost inside buildings--and psychological scientists could help architects understand where and why people might get lost in their buildings, according to the authors of an article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

The flu virus uses a shuttle mechanism to relay protons through a channel in a process necessary for the virus to infect a host cell, according to a research project led by Mei Hong of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory.

Researchers at the University of Iowa have pinpointed the part of the brain that causes people to experience fear -- a discovery that could improve treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety conditions.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have discovered that "new" genes which have evolved in species as little as one million years ago can be just as essential for life as ancient genes.

Researchers at Ohio State University have demonstrated the first plastic computer memory device that utilizes the spin of electrons to read and write data.

Scientists from several institutions, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Washington, have found that if humans reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly in the next decade or two, enough Arctic ice is likely to remain intact during late summer and early autumn for polar bears to survive.

Tinkering with a single gene may give perennial grasses more robust roots and speed up the timeline for creating biofuels, according to researchers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.