First evidence of planet-wide groundwater system on Mars

Mars Express has revealed the first geological evidence of a system of ancient interconnected lakes that once lay deep beneath the Red Planet’s surface, five of which may contain minerals crucial to life. Mars appears to be an arid world, but its surface shows compelling signs that large amounts of water once existed across the planet.

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The ‘Golden Death’ Bacterium Found in a Rotten Apple

This “spectacular” pathogen dissolves its host from inside out. For several years in the fall, Marie-Anne Félix would walk through an apple orchard near Paris in search of rotten fruit. Félix, an evolutionary biologist at École normale supérieure, studies tiny, translucent worms called nematodes. These worms feed on bacteria, so they tend to congregate, as their prey do, on the flesh of decaying fruit. In 2009, Félix picked up one such apple rich in nematodes. She took samples back to her lab, where she tried to grow worms and bacteria from the apple in petri dishes.

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Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

Looking at how children process information may give programmers useful hints about directions for computer learning

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Cultured meat seems gross? It's much better than animal agriculture

The world is in the grips of a food-tech revolution. One of the most compelling new developments is cultured meat, also known as clean, cell-based or slaughter-free meat. It’s grown from stem cells taken from a live animal without the need for slaughter. Proponents hail cultured meat as the long-awaited solution to the factory farming problem. If commercialized successfully, it could solve many of the environmental, animal welfare and public health issues of animal agriculture while giving consumers exactly what they’re used to eating.

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10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019, curated by Bill Gates

We asked Gates to choose this year’s list of inventions that will change the world for the better.

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Why it takes a supercomputer to map a mouse brain

Inside a 25,000 square foot room within Argonne National Laboratory one of the most formidable supercomputers in the world — Theta — is applying its incredible computing power to the largest batch of data ever recorded or analyzed. It’s information that researchers hope might one day contribute to our understanding of intelligence itself.

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AI may replace today's jobs, but imagine a teacher for every student and no lines for the doctor

The president of Silicon Valley's most prominent start-up incubator says that artificial intelligence will probably replace most of the jobs people do today, but should pave the way for more personalized jobs and a massive increase in "material abundance" that could boost the size of the global GDP by 50 percent a year within decades. Sam Altman is the leader of Y Combinator, and has also been engaged with projects to predict and shape the long-term future of technology.

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Chinese engineers look to graphene to drive deep space exploration

A two-dimensional form of carbon known as graphene might one day help power space exploration into the unknown universe, say Chinese space engineers. Graphene, which is just one atom thick, could enable light-powered propulsion technology leading to fuel-free spacecraft. Traditional spacecraft depend on chemical propellants, and the amount they carry determines how far they can fly, said Song Shengju, the research leader at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

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The most popular Porsche is going electric

Porsche is upping its bet on electric vehicles. The German luxury carmaker said Tuesday that it will release an electric version of the Macan SUV, its most popular model, in the next few years. Production of the "fully electric" Macan is set to start "early in the next decade," Porsche said in a statement. It will be manufactured at the company's existing plant for the Macan in Leipzig, Germany.

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Yeast produce low-cost, high-quality cannabinoids

Scientists alter yeast metabolism to produce THC, CBD and other cannabis derivatives

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Tobacco plants transformed into ‘green bioreactors’ to benefit human health

Researchers at Western University and Lawson Health Research Institute are using tobacco plants as ‘green bioreactors’ to produce an anti-inflammatory protein with powerful therapeutic potential. The plants are being used to produce large quantities of a human protein called Interleukin 37, or IL-37. The protein is naturally produced in the human kidney in very small quantities and has powerful anti-inflammatory and immune-suppressing properties, providing potential for treating a number of inflammatory and autoimmune disorders like type 2 diabetes, stroke, dementia and arthritis.

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Teaching scientists how to share code

Would it surprise you to learn that most of the world's scholarly research is not owned by the people who funded it or who created it? Rather it's owned by private corporations and locked up in proprietary systems, leading to problems around sharing, reuse, and reproducibility.

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Elon Musk on Moon Bases, Mars, and How Not to Be Vaporized

In January, we ran an exclusive interview with Elon Musk in which he explained, for the first time, his full thinking—and the complex engineering questions—behind his decision to construct SpaceX’s Starship rocket and booster with stainless steel. The previous design for the rocket (which was then known as the BFR) had called for carbon fiber, but Musk recalculated and went with steel due to its durability, cost-effectiveness, and ductility.

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Death from above: Boeing unveils autonomous fighter jet

Military contractor Boeing announced Wednesday that it is developing an autonomous fighter jet plane that it plans to sell to customers around the world. The company plans to fly the pilot-free plane, dubbed the Boeing Airpower Teaming System, sometime in 2020. While the company says it can design the plane according to a given customers needs, the autonomous jet may be particularly well-suited for long-distance surveillance missions that a human pilot may not be able to perform, according to Reuters.

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Making sense of how the blind ‘see’ color

What do you think of when you think of a rainbow? If you’re sighted, you’re probably imagining colors arcing through the sky just after the rain. But what about someone who can’t see a rainbow? How does a congenitally blind person’s knowledge of a rainbow — or even something as seemingly simple as the color red — differ from that of the sighted?

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New Jupiter photo from NASA’s Juno spacecraft is utterly gorgeous

Our Solar System is full of planets and moons that are quite interesting, varying from dusty rock worlds like Mars to frigid collections of methane lakes like on Saturn’s moon Titan. But of all the objects orbiting the Sun, Jupiter has to be the most interesting to look at. There’s just so much going on in its swirling clouds that you could stare forever and never get bored.

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CRISPR reveals the secret life of antimicrobial peptides

When it comes to the immune system, we usually think about lymphocytes like B and T cells or macrophages going on constant seek-and-destroy missions against invading pathogens like bacteria and viruses. But our immune system actually includes a lesser-known and less-studied first line of defense referred to as “innate immunity”.

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Renewable energy policies actually work

For most of the industrial era, a nation's carbon emissions moved in lock step with its economy. Growth meant higher emissions. But over the past decade or so, that has changed. Even as the global economy continued to grow, carbon emissions remained flat or dropped a bit.

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Over 8,000 marijuana convictions in San Francisco dismissed with help from a computer algorithm

Technology meets law and order to help dismiss thousands of marijuana-related convictions dating back to 1975 in San Francisco. The San Francisco District Attorney's office announced on Monday that 8,132 convictions will be dismissed thanks to a computer algorithm that automatically scanned court records. "This makes San Francisco the first county in the country to complete the automated marijuana record clearance process," said a statement from the office of San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón

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Space agencies preparing for 3-year round-trip journey to Mars

Getting to Mars is a journey that could involve 140 million miles of travel. Astronauts on a Mars mission will be subjected to extreme conditions requiring problem-solving skills and creative thinking. How are we preparing for a Mars mission?

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How Competitiveness Leads Us To Sabotage Other People’s Personal Goals At The Expense Of Our Own

Say you’re planning to run a marathon, and you have a target time in mind. Or you’re on a weight- loss diet, and your aim is to lose six kilos in six weeks. Or, there’s an exam coming up, and you want to score above 75 per cent. These are all individual goal pursuits. In theory, you’re not in direct competition with anybody else, though of course if you’re part of a running club, or a weight loss group, or an undergraduate class, you will be aware that others around you are striving to achieve their own goals.

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The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change

Just over a century ago in Ludwigshafen, Germany, a scientist named Carl Bosch assembled a team of engineers to exploit a new technique in chemistry. A year earlier, another German chemist, Fritz Haber, hit upon a process to pull nitrogen (N) from the air and combine it with hydrogen (H) to produce tiny amounts of ammonia (NH₃). But Haber’s process was delicate, requiring the maintenance of high temperatures and high pressure.

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New parents face up to six years of sleep deprivation, study says

Starting a family is a well-known way to make a good night’s sleep a distant dream, but new research suggests the parental yawns might go on for six years. Researchers tracking the sleep of thousands of men and women as their family size increased have found that shuteye hits a low about three months after birth – with the effect strongest in women.

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Neuroscientists Say They've Found an Entirely New Form of Neural Communication

Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they've been surgically severed

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Why a Grape Turns Into a Fireball in a Microwave

Nuking a grape produces sparks of plasma, as plenty of YouTube videos document. Now physicists think they can explain how that energy builds up.

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DNA Gets a New — and Bigger — Genetic Alphabet

DNA is spelled out with four letters, or bases. Researchers have now built a system with eight. It may hold clues to the potential for life elsewhere in the universe and could also expand our capacity to store digital data on Earth. In 1985, the chemist Steven A. Benner sat down with some colleagues and a notebook and sketched out a way to expand the alphabet of DNA. He has been trying to make those sketches real ever since.

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Association of doxycycline use with the development of gastroenteritis, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease in Australians depl...

The risk of acute gastroenteritis was associated with deployment itself without clear association with doxycycline. Doxycycline exposure was associated with increased onset of IBS in those deployed to developing (odds ratio [OR], 6.99; 95% confidence interval [CI], 3.19-15.31) and developed country (OR, 6.93; 95% CI, 1.40-34.39). New onset of IBD (1.5%) was associated with deployment to developed countries and with doxycycline exposure

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Is Silicon Valley's quest for immortality a fate worse than death?

China’s first emperor ordered his subjects to search for the elixir of life in a quest for immortality. In 16th century France, nobles would drink gold in a bid to extend their lifespans. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king at the heart of humanity’s earliest epic poem, found a magic herb, but a snake ate it. In 2015, a woman on the MTV series True Life: I’m Obsessed With Staying Young bathed in pig blood.

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Jokers please: first human Mars mission may need onboard comedians

Researchers are working with Nasa to see if clowns help team cohesion on long space missions

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Does Sunlight Through Glass Provide Vitamin D?

You can’t get adequate UVB exposure sitting indoors or in a car.

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NASA clears SpaceX test flight to space station

NASA gave its final go-ahead on Friday to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to conduct its first unmanned test flight of a newly designed crew capsule to the International Space Station on March 2. The approval cleared a key hurdle for SpaceX in its quest to help NASA revive America’s human spaceflight program, stalled since space shuttle missions came to an end in 2011.

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Scientists use CRISPR to make stem cells invisible to immune system

Researchers at UC San Francisco used CRISPR to modify stem cells in a way that makes them essentially invisible to the immune system.

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A 'Dragon Aurora' Appeared in the Sky Over Iceland, and NASA Is a Little Confused

A gargantuan green dragon hisses in the sky over Iceland. Either "Game of Thrones" really upped its production budget for its final season, or the sun belched a barrage of charged particles into our atmosphere again. As much as any of us would like to see a real dragon breathe flames into the winter sky, buzzkill NASA blames solar activity — as usual — for the writhing, "fire-breathing"- aurora that loomed over Iceland earlier this month.

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Scientists Just Added Four New Letters to the Genetic Code

A four-letter alphabet might seem limited, but it’s all nature needed to write the instructions for all life on the planet. News that researchers have added four letters to the genetic alphabet opens the door to new possibilities in synthetic biology, data storage, and even the search for life beyond our planet. The genetic code at the heart of all living things is elegantly simple. Each half of the famous double helix structure is built from four small molecules called bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine (ATCG).

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Under Trump's Tariffs, The US Lost 20,000 Solar Energy Jobs

2016 was the best year on record for solar energy in the United States. A report from the U.S. Department of Energy at the time showed that solar energy was responsible for a much larger share of employment in the electric power sector (43%) than the whole of the fossil fuel industry combined (22%). With such robust numbers, it seemed as though solar energy, and renewables more broadly, were about to revolutionize the energy sector in the United States and lead the push towards cleaner energy and lower carbon emissions.

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Early-Career Job Loss Negatively Affects Long-term Health

Numerous studies have suggested that job loss and unemployment lead to poorer health. Sociologists at the University of Bamberg are now continuing this research and have set out to answer whether job loss still has health-related consequences even if it occurred decades ago and subsequent employment may have been found. Jonas Voßemer and Professor Michael Gebel, Chair of Methods of Empirical Social Research at the University of Bamberg, have shown with their current research that...

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Eating ‘zombie’ deer meat is safe, researchers say

Eating meat from “zombie” deer appears to be perfectly safe — for now. Researchers examined about 80 people who’ve feasted on the meat of deer that tested positive for chronic wasting disease — a fatal illness that causes zombie-like behavior in the animals and could spread to humans — and found over the course of the six-year study “no significant changes in health conditions,” USA Today reported on Thursday. The tainted deer meat was unwittingly served to 200 to 250 at a fire company in Oneida County, New York, on March 13, 2005.

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Could we soon be able to detect cancer in 10 minutes?

About seven years ago, researchers at the US DNA sequencing company Illumina started to notice something odd. A new blood test it ran on 125,000 expectant mothers looking for genetic abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome in their foetuses returned some extremely unexpected signals in 10 cases. Chillingly, it dawned on them that the abnormal DNA they were seeing wasn’t from the foetuses but was, rather, undiagnosed cancer in the mothers.

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An Archaeologist Says He's Figured Out The Secret of The Pyramids' Peculiar Alignment

For centuries, the pyramids of Giza have puzzled researchers - not just their mysterious voids and hidden chambers, but exactly how ancient Egyptians built such impressive structures without modern technology.

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Researchers Identify Molecule With Anti-Aging Effects On Vascular System

A molecule produced during fasting or calorie restriction has anti-aging effects on the vascular system, which could reduce the occurrence and severity of human diseases related to blood vessels, such as cardiovascular disease, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

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NASA Picks Science Experiments to Send to the Moon This Year

Following on the heels of its announcement to return to the moon this year, NASA announced Thursday the first batch of science projects and technology demonstrations they want to send skyward in 2019, assuming their commercial partners can launch on time. The selections highlight the science questions NASA wants answered as it ramps up robotic missions to the moon and shoots for placing humans back on the surface within the next decade, this time on a more permanent basis.

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The Uprooting of Mind: Can AI Save Us?

The phenomenon of Mind has evaded philosophers, theologians, scientists, and artists since the dawn of civilization. Today, the concept of Mind is front and centre with advances in AI and machine learning. The promises of AI and the hope of a Singularity to lead civilization forward, into uncharted lands towards a utopian future is our latest, human all too human attempt to grasp at an idea to soothe the unsoothable.

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Smile: Some airliners have cameras on seat-back screens

Now there is one more place where cameras could start watching you — from 30,000 feet. Newer seat-back entertainment systems on some airplanes operated by American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Singapore Airlines have cameras, and it’s likely they are also on planes used by other carriers. All four airlines said that they have never activated the cameras and have no plans to use them.

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Bionic Hands Let Amputees Feel and Grip

If you’re sitting near a coffee mug, pick it up, and note how easy it is to do without really looking. You feel the curvature of the handle, the width of the cup, the slipperiness of the ceramic. Your hand glides into place and you squeeze, getting a sense of the weight, and bring the cup to your mouth. Now, imagine trying to do that with a robotic hand that gives you no sensory feedback. You get no information about the tiny adjustments that your fingers must make in order to grasp it properly. It feels more like operating a joystick than a hand.

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SpaceX to Fly Falcon 9 Rocket Stage for Record-Setting 4th Time

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that just launched an Israeli moon lander will make some more history soon, if all goes according to plan. The Thursday night (Feb. 21) liftoff of the Beresheet lunar lander — which in April will try to become the first privately funded craft to touch down on the moon — and two other satellites was the third spaceflight for this particular Falcon 9's first stage. The booster came back to Earth for yet another landing Thursday and will be prepped for a fourth mission, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said.

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This is bad: the UAE's favorite sleazeball cybermercenaries have applied for permission to break Mozilla's web encryption

Darkmatter is also one of the least-discriminating cybermercenary bands in the world, available to help torturers, murderers and thugs hang onto power by attacking opposition movements and letting the secret police know who to arrest, torture and kill

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Is a More Generous Society Possible?

Generosity helps communities manage risk and cope with disasters. New research untangles the factors that lead people to help neighbors in need.

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This star's been exploding every year for millions of years

Astronomers have discovered a star in the Andromeda galaxy that has been regularly erupting for the past million years, leaving behind one of the biggest shells of ejected material scientists have ever seen. The new research, which was published last month in the journal Nature, not only marks the first discovery of such a super-remnant in another galaxy, it also paves the way for detecting a potentially massive population of repeatedly exploding stars, called recurrent novae, which may help shed light on how the universe has changed over time.

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The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes

By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.

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A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

Physicists used to search for the smallest components of the universe. What if that’s not the point?

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