Rubella Eliminated From the Americas, Thanks to MMR Vaccine

First we wiped out smallpox in North and South America. Then we rid the Americas of polio. Now, for the third time, the Americas are the first region in the world to eliminate yet another disease through vaccines: rubella.
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A Bat's Secret to Flying Like a Boss? Tiny, Tiny Hairs

Scientists show that bats use microscopic hairs on their wings to feel their way through the air.
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Graveyard of Stars May Lie at Milky Way's Center

An unidentified blast of powerful X-rays suggests something violent is happening at the core of the galaxy - but astronomers aren't sure what it is.
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Dead zones — where animals suffocate and die — found in the Atlantic’s open waters

Most dead zones are found along the coast and are a result of chemicals triggering algae blooms.
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Astronomers discover three super-Earths orbiting nearby star

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system of three super-Earths orbiting a star only 54 light-years away.
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Your Tough Job Might Help Keep You Sharp

In an eight-year study of older people, those who had held mentally demanding, stimulating jobs tended to retain their mental agility better than people whose work was less stimulating.
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Senators Approve Bill To Stop EPA From Using ‘Secret Science’

A Senate committee has advanced legislation that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science to craft regulations intended to protect the environment and public health.
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New Test Suggests NASA's "Impossible" EM Drive Will Work In Space

Last year, NASA’s advanced propulsion research wing made headlines by announcing the successful test of a physics-defying electromagnetic drive, or EM drive. Now, this futuristic engine, which could in theory propel objects to near-relativistic speeds, has been shown to work inside a space-like vacuum.
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Black Ops 3 - A terrifying vision of the future

If real life imitates art, we’re doomed. This teaser video for the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 video game paints a very plausible vision of the future, so much so that watching it totally feels like channel surfing while fast forwarding through time. The concept and video was created by 72 & Sunny, with post-production help from design studio Elastic
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Microsoft Will Guess How Old You Are From a Single Photo

Head over to Microsoft’s how-old.net, upload a photo of yourself, and the site will spit out a prediction for how old you are—as well as your gender. Did it guess right? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.
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​The Very Serious Business of Figuring Out How Earth Will Handle First Contact with Aliens

If aliens landed in Central Park tomorrow, how would humankind respond? Would we point every tank and gun squarely on the spacecraft? Or would we offer a more neighborly greeting? What questions would we ask these extraterrestrials? And what would we tell them about us?
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Earth's Mysterious Hum Explained

Even planets can get a bad case of tinnitus, according to a new study that explains Earth's mysterious, never-ending hum. Turns out, ocean waves are the culprit behind these mysterious tremors that make the Earth ring like a bell.
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Almost Human

Robot images
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NASA unveils shape-changing bird-like plane wing

Nasa jointly develops a plane wing that can change shape during flight, reducing drag and improving fuel efficiency.
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Lenin's Body Improves with Age

For thousands of years humans have used embalming methods to preserve dead bodies. But nothing compares with Russia's 90-year-old experiment to preserve the body of Vladimir Lenin, communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union. Generations of Russian scientists have spent almost a century fine-tuning preservation techniques that have maintained the look, feel and flexibility of Lenin's body.
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Falling to Earth: unmanned Russian spacecraft ‘has nowhere else to go’

A Russian spacecraft that is tumbling around the Earth after it malfunctioned en route to the International Space Station (ISS) could remain in orbit for more than a week before crashing down to Earth.
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NASA May Have Accidentally Discovered Faster-Than-Light Travel

The idea of faster-than-light travel has been one of the greatest staples in science fiction for as long as the genre has been around. The idea of traveling to other planets with terrestrial technology seemed impossible for a long time - but, with the power of faster-than-light travel, moving from planet to planet would be almost instantaneous. Who wouldn't want to go zipping through the galaxy, discovering and visiting all sorts of different planets?
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American Airlines planes grounded by iPad app error

American Airlines delay dozens of flights after an iPad app used by its pilots stopped working.
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University of Glasgow researcher discovers 'oldest book'

What is believed to be Scotland's earliest non-religious manuscript is discovered by a researcher at the University of Glasgow.
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When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life

Should elaborate fantasies be considered a psychiatric disorder?
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World-first remote air traffic control system lands in Sweden

Small airports often don't have much traffic because they don't have an adequate tower system, and they don't have an adequate tower system because they don't have much traffic.
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Insanity Drone

This supercharged drone will blow you away!
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Ultra-sensitive sensor detects individual electrons

Scientists have created an electronic device so accurate that it can detect the charge of a single electron in less than one microsecond. It has been dubbed the 'gate sensor' and could be applied in quantum computers of the future to read information stored in the charge or spin of a single electron.
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Feds Say It's Time To Cut Back On Fluoride In Drinking Water

Excess fluoride consumption is leading to tiny white marks on many people's teeth. It's mainly a cosmetic problem, but one that could be solved by lowering the fluoride in drinking water.
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Nasa spaceship takes stunning photo of Mercury - before it crashes into the planet

These astonishing images, taken by the Nasa Messenger spacecraft, show Mercury as never seen before.
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Research confirms medical phenomenon called 'chemo brain'

Researchers recently confirmed the reality of a condition called chemo brain, in which patients complain of a wandering mind and an inability to concentrate.
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Color-switching nano-laser brings real optical nanotech much closer

A breakthrough makes it possible to tune the color of a nano-scale laser in real time - and that could be the key to making useful, real-world nano-optical devices.
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Fully Restored WWII Fighter Plane Up for Auction

A British warplane that was shot down in 1940 during World War II and was later meticulously restored to flying condition is slated to hit the auction block this summer.
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Have lower back pain? You might be part chimp

Chimpanzees have a difficult time walking upright for long periods at a time in part because the shape of the chimp spine is better adapted to walking quadrupedally. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved a number of skeletal adaptations — spine shape included — that makes bipedal locomotion possible. But according to new research by scientists from Scotland, Canada and Iceland, not all humans are as evolved as others in this respect, reports the BBC.
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Living With Being Dead

This terrifying disorder turns people into living zombies. But somewhere in the troubled brains of victims may be the ke…
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Why is the Sun's Atmosphere Hotter than its Surface?

Clear evidence now suggests that the intense heat of the sun's atmosphere depends on explosive bursts, not continuous heating. This solution to the coronal heating mystery was presented at a media briefing on April 28, 2015.
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Is the universe a hologram?

The 'holographic principle,' the idea that a universe with gravity can be described by a quantum field theory in fewer dimensions, has been used for years as a mathematical tool in strange curved spaces. New results suggest that the holographic principle also holds in flat spaces. Our own universe could in fact be two dimensional and only appear three dimensional -- just like a hologram.
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Vaccine Patches For Measles Could Be Here By 2017

The highly anticipated technology could save thousands of lives per year
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Depression Can Physically Alter Your DNA

Depression doesn’t just change your mentality—it also leaves marks on your DNA, report scientists from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG). The finding was so surprising that the scientists initially met it with skepticism and admit that they required a substantial amount of convincing to believe it was not merely a coincidence.
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Could Your Brain Repair Itself?

Imagine the brain could reboot, updating its damaged cells with new, improved units. That may sound like science fiction — but it’s a potential reality scientists are investigating right now. Ralitsa Petrova details the science behind neurogenesis and explains how we might harness it to reverse diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
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These 9 Words Don't Mean What You Think They Mean

The following is an excerpt from The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, in which author Charles Murray discusses words with meanings that have changed - and not always for the better.
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No more science fiction: 3D holographic images

Three-dimensional images you can see without special glasses have been created with a clever user of lasers and graphene.
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'Supercharged' genomics: 100 years of breakthroughs possible in 10 years

A "supercharged" approach to human genome research could see as many health breakthroughs made in the next decade as in the previous century, says Brad Perkins, chief medical offer at Human Longevity Inc. "I don’t have a pill" to boost human lifespan, Perkins admitted on stage at WIRED Health 2015. But he has perhaps the next best thing -- data, and the means to make sense of it. Based in San Diego, Human Longevity is fixed on using genome data and analytics to develop new ways to fight...
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'Bizarre' Jurassic dinosaur discovered in remarkable new find

Chilesaurus diegosuarezi belongs to the theropod group of dinosaurs, which includes tyrannosaurs, but was vegetarian and has other curious features
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Stephen Hawking on why everyone must go into space

Humans should go and live in space within the next 1,000 years, or it will die out, Stephen Hawking has warned.
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Climate Deniers to Pope Francis: 'There Is No Global Warming Crisis'

As Pope Francis prepares a historic document to make environmental issues a priority for Catholics, a group of climate-change deniers is trying to convince the pontiff this week that global warming is nothing to worry about.
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Why would an animal lose its brain?

Some extremely simple animals may have got rid of their brains because they simply had no need for one. And this could have been key to their success.
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Powering Your Car With Water: Audi Realizes the Green Dream, Synthesizes Diesel From H20

Maybe EVs aren’t inevitable after all. Audi, together with the German energy company Sunfire, has announced that it is able to synthesize diesel from water and CO2, and that the product can fuel automobiles.
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A gentle nudge with a nuke: deflecting Earth-bound asteroids

In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the event sent more than a thousand people to the hospital, mostly from flying glass from shattered windows. The Chelyabinsk meteor was a relatively small chunk of space rock—asteroid researchers think it was probably about 20 meters (66 feet) across—but exploding over a city made it a noteworthy event. It's probable many similar asteroids hit Earth on a regular basis...
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The moral challenge of invisibility

We have all had those moments of social embarrassment: you’ve just said or done the dumbest thing, everyone is looking at you, and you wish you could just — well, vanish. But would it help if you really could? Apparently, it would. Using a virtual-reality headset and a calculated confusion of the senses, neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have been able to give people the illusion that their body is invisible.
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Something’s Afoot: Investigating the Names for Shoes

Whether you’re a shoe aficionado or somebody who regards footwear as merely something to help avoid standing on nails, you might be interested in the etymological backgrounds to the names of some common varieties of shoe.
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Giant cosmic tsunami wakes up comatose galaxies

Galaxies are often found in clusters, which contain many 'red and dead' members that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Now an international team of astronomers have discovered that these comatose galaxies can sometimes come back to life. If clusters of galaxies merge, a huge shock wave can drive the birth of a new generation of stars -- the sleeping galaxies get a new lease of life.
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Mitochondria editing tried in mice

Researchers develop a technique to edit out bits of mitochondrial DNA that could otherwise pass on incurable diseases, a study in mice shows.
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First liquid diagnostic laser tool developed

Scientists have developed the first liquid nanoscale laser technology that could lead to a new way of doing 'lab on a chip' medical diagnostics. The laser is tunable in real time, meaning you can quickly and simply produce different colours, a unique and useful feature, researchers said. The laser technology could lead to practical applications, such as a new form of a "lab on a chip" for medical diagnostics, they said.
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Ingenious: David Krakauer

The systems theorist explains what’s wrong with standard models of intelligence.
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