What powered the Earth's earliest life?

Most people have seen nylon listed as a material on their clothing tags, but nylon is used in an array of other products, too, including automotive parts, wire insulation and medical supplies. Unfortunately, one of the building blocks of nylon, adipic acid, is produced from petroleum-derived benzene through energy-intensive processes and has a rather high carbon footprint. However, there may be a better way to produce this ubiquitous polymer.

In a first, a large, international team led by multiple labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has published a complete wiring diagram of all the connections between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.

Parents who come down hard on their children for telling lies or misbehaving may believe they are teaching the child right from wrong. But new research by NUS suggests that overly strict or punitive parenting could be part of what drives the behavior in the first place.

Archaeologists digging at an Inca site on the arid coast of southern Peru have unearthed two rare, roughly 500-year-old freeze-dried potatoes. The potatoes are among the only ones found in more than a century and would have been transported across the empire from the freezing peaks of the Andes.