The United States can become more energy efficient and create more "green" jobs by adopting some of the strategies used by the European Union and Australia to rate and disclose the performance of commercial and government-owned buildings, according to a new RAND Corporation study issued today.

Being seen as either well behaved or naughty at school is never entirely in the hands of the individual child, this study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council shows.

CSIRO researchers have discovered that micro-organisms that help break down contaminants under the soil can actually get too hot for their own good.

Korean computer scientists have developed a security policy specification for home networks that could make us more secure from cyber attack in our homes. They report details in the International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing.

Black holes are invading stars, providing a radical explanation to bright flashes in the universe that are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy today.

TECNALIA Technological Corporation has introduced innovative robots at Euskotren’s station in Atxuri (Bilbao) and which are mobile, multifunctional, collaborative, autonomous and polyvalent, suitable for a wide range of work from street cleaning and rubbish collection to accompanying elderly people.

A nearly complete fossil of what is now known as a Raptorex was discovered in Northern China. This small-scale Tyrannosaurus rex lived long before the well known T-Rex and weighed about the same as a human. Paleontologists note that the Raptorex was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds. It lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth.

The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.

A conversation over a glass of wine turned into EUREKA-backed research effort to create new, healthy wine-flavoured products. The German and Spanish partners of project E! 4008 PROVINO say they have invented a way of making powder from by-products of red wine production which could be used in everything from yoghurt and chocolates to creams and face masks.

By testing formerly blind patients within weeks of sight restoration, Sinha and his colleagues found that subjects had very limited ability to distinguish an object from its background, identify overlapping objects, or even piece together the different parts of an object.

An international study involving Monash University mathematician Dr Malcolm Clark has been used to demonstrate the impact of global warming and to predict the effect further warming will have on plant life.

Scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth are today calling for urgent research to understand the impact of renewable energy developments on marine life. The study, now published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, highlights potential environmental benefits and threats resulting from marine renewable energy, such as off-shore wind farms and wave and tidal energy conversion devices.