Science

DNA molecules that follow specific instructions could offer more precise molecular control of synthetic chemical systems, a discovery that opens the door for engineers to create molecular machines with new and complex behaviors. Researchers have created chemical amplifiers and a chemical oscillator using a systematic method that has the potential ...

Let me freak you out for a second. You know what bitcoin is, right? I mean, no, but quickly, it’s a “cryptocurrency” that’s basically secret computer money. One bitcoin, which doesn’t actually have a real, physical form, is worth at this moment upwards of $ 16,000. But to get one, ...

Ah, the phantom traffic jam. You know, that thing where the flow suddenly slows to a halt and you inch forward for a half hour and then things pick up again and you look around for an accident or construction or anything at all for Pete’s sake that might justify ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] In the wild, chimpanzees face any number of dire threats, ranging from poachers to predators to deforestation. That’s why scientists, investigating an outbreak of respiratory disease in a community of wild chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, were surprised and dismayed to discover that a ...

A Langmuir probe, developed in Sweden and flown to Saturn on the Cassini spacecraft, has made exciting discoveries in the atmosphere of the planet. Jan-Erik Wahlund at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala and his colleagues show that there is a strong coupling, both chemically and electrically, between ...

In late 2012, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier approached a handful of American scientists about starting a company, a Crispr company. They included UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, George Church at Harvard University, and his former postdoc Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute—the brightest stars in the then-tiny field of Crispr research. ...

In 2014 Henrik Karlsson, a Swedish entrepreneur whose startup was failing, was lying in bed with a bankruptcy notice when the BBC called. The reporter had a scoop: On the eve of releasing a major report, the United Nation’s climate change panel appeared to be touting an untried technology as ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] As far our brain is concerned, talking to ourselves in our heads may be fundamentally the same as speaking our thoughts out loud, new research shows. The findings may have important implications for understanding why people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia hear voices. All ...

Take a look at this cool space trash can! Seen here is the Cygnus cargo ship, docked with the International Space Station at sunrise. See that eerie blue glow to the right? That’s the curve of the Earth, its atmosphere illuminated by the sun. Cygnus arrived at the station on ...

Today, a teaspoon of spit and a hundred bucks is all you need to get a snapshot of your DNA. But getting the full picture—all 3 billion base pairs of your genome—requires a much more laborious process. One that, even with the aid of sophisticated statistics, scientists still struggle over. ...