Titanium dioxide nanoparticles E171 may impact human health. University of Sydney research provides new evidence that nanoparticles, which are present in many food items, may have a substantial and harmful influence on human health. E171 is commonly used in high quantities in foods and some medicines as a whitening agent. Found in more than 900 food products such as chewing gum and mayonnaise, E171 is consumed in high proportion everyday by the general population.

Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, the mice study found that consumption of food containing E171 has an impact on the gut microbiota (defined by the trillions of bacteria that inhabit the gut) which coul...

Approximately every two Earth years, when it is summer on the southern hemisphere of Mars, a window opens: Only in this season can water vapor efficiently rise from the lower into the upper Martian atmosphere. There, winds carry the rare gas to the north pole. While part of the water vapor decays and escapes into space, the rest sinks back down near the poles. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany describe this unusual Martian water cycle in a current issue of the Geophysical Research Letters...

Collaborating scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Princeton University have discovered a new layered ferromagnetic semiconductor, a rare type of material that holds great promise for next-generation electronic technologies.

As the name implies, semiconductors are the Goldilocks of electrically conductive materials— not a metal, and not an insulator, but a “just-right” in-between whose conducting properties can be altered and customized in ways that create the basis for the world’s modern electronic capabilities. Especially rare are the ones closer to an insulator than to a metal.

The recent discovery o...

Researchers have found, analyzing data from the Gaia satellite, that a strong star formation burst occurred in the Milky Way about 2 to 3 billion years ago. In this process, more than 50% of the stars that created the galactic disc may have been born...