Just as a healthy human baby can grow into a healthy adult, so it is for plants. A variety of nutrients and exposure to different experiences often expose the human being to opportunities of expansion. A new study has unveiled why a field with a variety of plants seems to attract fewer plant-eating insects than farm land with just one type of crop. Scientists and farmers have puzzled over this pattern that makes protecting crops from pests a challenge.

Successful organic fruit-growing starts with selecting varieties that are inherently disease resistant. This important first step eliminates half the problem.

Research published in the current issue of Nature and led by William Wetzel, a new Michigan State University entomologist and the study's lead author, is shedding light on this interaction. Plants suppress their insect enemies by being variable, not just by being low quality on average as is typically thought.

Foxconn has deployed 40,000 robots in its factories in mainland China as it aims to reduce the number of workers at its plants creating digital devices.

Dai Chia-peng, general manager of the automation technology development committee of Foxconn, said during an interview with local Chinese media that those robots are basically made by Foxconn itself, except for some parts like servo motors and reducers that come from other parties. Those robots were deployed to Foxconn's manufacturing base in Zhengzhou, a panel factory in Chengdu, and computer and peripherals factories in Kunshan and Jiashan.

For the first time, scientists have helped a paralyzed man experience the sense of touch in his mind-controlled robotic arm.

For the cutting-edge experiment, a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, electrodes smaller than a grain of sand were implanted in the sensory cortex of the man's brain. The electrodes received signals from a robot arm. When a researcher pressed the fingers of the prosthesis, the man felt the pressure in the fingers of his paralyzed right hand, effectively bypassing his damaged spinal cord

The results of the experiment, which have been repeated over several months with 30-year-old Nathan Copeland, offer a breakthrough in the restoration of a critical function in people with paralyzed limbs: the ability not just to move those limbs, but to feel them.

The experiment with Copeland was a featured stop Thursday when President Obama visited Pittsburgh for a White House Frontiers Conference on advances in science, medicine and technology. The researchers described how neuroscience has been able to build a technology where simply imagining a motion translates into motion, in this case a robotic arm.

Bland food could soon be a thing of the past after scientists invented a revolutionary new device which completely alters our sense of taste and may prove to be a breakthrough in the fight against obesity.

British scientists are on the verge of making broccoli taste like chocolate and tofu taste like steak.

Researchers at London's City University have built a prototype for a device, called the Taste Buddy, which uses low-level electrical current to 'trick' your taste buds.

Astronomers have long pondered how many galaxies might exist in the universe - and the answer appears to be a staggering two trillion. The figure, obtained from Hubble Telescope images, has shocked scientists who estimated the number to be at least 10 times smaller.

The finding wasn't easy to come by. An international team of scientists examined deep space images taken by the Hubble from over the past 20 years, and converted them into 3D pictures. From there, they measured the number of galaxies at different times in the history of the universe, going back more than 13 billion years - near the time of the 'Big Bang.'

The researchers, led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham, also used new mathematical models which allowed them to infer the existence of galaxies which telescopes cannot observe. The team's findings are detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

For the number of galaxies we now see and their numbers to add up, the researchers concluded that there must be a further 90 percent of galaxies in the observable universe that are too faint and too far away to be seen.

One of the physicists who helped find the Higgs boson, Elina Berglund, has spent the past three years working on something completely different - a fertility app that tells women when they're fertile or not.

It's not the first fertility app out there, but Berglund's app works so well that it's been shown to help women avoid pregnancy with 99.5 percent reliability - an efficacy that puts it right up there with the pill and condoms.

Best of all, the app doesn't have any side effects, and just requires women to input their temperature daily to map their fertility throughout the month.

Back in 2012, Berglund was working at CERN on the Large Hadron Collider experiment to find the famous Higgs boson. But after the discovery of the particle, she felt it was time to work on something completely different.

"I wanted to give my body a break from the pill," she told Daniela Walker from Wired, "but I couldn't find any good forms of natural birth control, so I wrote an algorithm for myself."

Columbus - Turns out, unicorns are not mystical fairy tale creatures, and scientists have the fossils to prove it.

We should point out first, however, that real unicorns are not pretty horses with wings and horns.

No, the real unicorn, known as Elasmotherium sibiricum, looked more like a hairy rhinoceros than a beautiful stallion. Unlike modern day rhinos, however, this one had a giant horn.

A comet strike may have triggered the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a rapid warming of the Earth caused by an accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide 56 million years ago, which offers analogs to global warming today. Sorting through samples of sediment from the time period, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered evidence of the strike in the form of microtektites - tiny dark glassy spheres typically formed by extraterrestrial impacts. The research will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

"This tells us that there was an extraterrestrial impact at the time this sediment was deposited - a space rock hit the planet," said Morgan Schaller, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Rensselaer, and corresponding author of the paper.

"The coincidence of an impact with a major climate change is nothing short of remarkable." Schaller is joined in the research by Rensselaer professor Miriam Katz and graduate student Megan Fung, James Wright of Rutgers University, and Dennis Kent of Columbia University.

Schaller was searching for fossilized remains of Foraminifera, a tiny organism that produces a shell, when he first noticed a microtektite in the sediment he was examining. Although it is common for researchers to search for fossilized remains in PETM sediments, microtektites have not been previously detected. Schaller and his team theorize this is because microtektites are typically dark in color, and do not stand out on the black sorting tray researchers use to search for light-colored fossilized remains. Once Schaller noticed the first microtektite, the researchers switched to a white sorting tray, and began to find more.

At peak abundance, the research team found as many as three microtektites per gram of sediment examined. Microtektites are typically spherical, or tear-drop shaped, and are formed by an impact powerful enough to melt and vaporize the target area, casting molten ejecta into the atmosphere. Some microtektites from the samples contained "shocked quartz," definitive evidence of their impact origin, and exhibited microcraters or were sintered together, evidence of the speed at which they were traveling as they solidified and hit the ground.

In the time before the current period of faith-based science, much good work was done on the role of the Sun in controlling climate. One of the best monographs from that time of innocence is Hoyt and Schatten's The Role of the Sun in Climate Change, published by Oxford University Press in 1997. That book starts with this paragraph:

About 400 years before the birth of Christ, near Mt. Lyscabettus in ancient Greece, the pale orb of the sun rose through the mists. According to habit, Meton recorded the sun's location on the horizon. In this era when much remained to be discovered, Meton hoped to find predictable changes in the locations of sunrise and moonrise. Although rainy weather had limited his recent observations, this foggy morning he discerned specks on the face of the sun, the culmination of many such blemishes in recent years. On a hunch, Meton began examining his more than 20 years of solar records. These seemed to confirm his belief: when the sun has spots, the weather tends to be wetter and rainier.

So the idea that sunspots and the solar cycle control climate is at least 2,400 years old. In the modern era, the appreciation of sunspots started again in 1610 with telescopic observations by Galileo, Thomas Harriot and others. The solar cycle was discovered by Samual Schwabe in 1843 after 17 years of observations, though William Herschel's correlation of sunspots and the wheat price in England dates from 1801. A 2003 paper by Pustilnik and Din entitled Influence of Solar Activity on State of Wheat Market in Medieval England confirmed Herschel's observation.

The first tick of a baby's heart happens as early as 16 days after conception, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Oxford.

Initially, analysts said the heart muscle contracted to beat eight days after conception in mice, roughly equating to 21 days in a human pregnancy. However, Oxford University teamed up with the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and found that the first heartbeat in babies happens much sooner.

BHF Professor Paul Riley, a leading researcher at the university said the team wanted to better understand how the heart develops.

"We are trying to better understand how the heart develops and ultimately what causes the heart defects that develop in the womb before birth and to extrapolate to adult heart repair," Riley said.

"By finding out how the heart first starts to beat and how problems can arise in heart development, we are one step closer to being able to prevent heart conditions from arising during pregnancy," he added.