Being born with a 'tabula rasa' – a clean slate – in the case of the brain is something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born. Babies born without these wrinkles – smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental deficiencies and their life expectancy is markedly reduced. The gene that causes this syndrome recently helped Weizmann Institute of Science researchers to probe ...

One of the main barriers to a wider adoption of OLED technology resides in its lack of efficiency compared to fluorescent lamps or Light-emitting diodes (LED). The SOLED project hoped to solve this problem using chiral organic semiconductor structures. The difference is undisputable: when put side by side with an LED display, its OLED counterpart will stand out thanks to its sharper images, better contrast and crisp colours.

  Scientists have managed to design microscopic silk capsules that mimic, on a very small scale, the structure of silkworm cocoons. The capsules can serve as a protective environment for the transport of sensitive “cargo” such as natural silk proteins, antibodies or other delicate molecules.

We know that human-induced environmental changes are responsible for coral bleaching, disease, and infertility. Loss of the world's stony coral reefs - up to 30% in the next 30 years, according to some estimates - will mean loss of their services, including sequestering some 70-90 million tons of carbon each year and supporting enormous marine biodiversity. Yet despite many advances, we are still far from understanding the causes and processes co...