For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be, […]
No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all Read More »
IN OCTOBER 2024, Carolina Millon, a former retail executive in Falls Church, Virginia, anxiously checked her email and found a notification that she had new test results from a recent breast biopsy ready to view. She took a deep breath before clicking on the link. As a carrier of mutations in the BRCA2 and CHEK2 genes,
Inspiration from nature’s engineers is helping rescue imperiled waterways One warm morning in the summer of 2025, the Beaver Brigade marched into Bernheim Forest. This woodland spans more than 16,000 acres (6,475 hectares) in north-central Kentucky. Every other month, volunteer brigade members hike in to make it more beaver-friendly. Beavers are nature’s engineers, notes Evan
Human-built ‘beaver’ dams help save struggling streams Read More »
It’s studded with tiny dots that vibrate to mimic the feel of real-world textures Worn on a fingertip, the new device uses a grid of tiny nodes to simulate textures, such as the feel of fabrics. Northwestern University Phones, tablets and other electronic gadgets display lifelike images and play realistic sounds. What’s next? Maybe, making
This Band Aid-like device could let you ‘feel’ the virtual world Read More »
Here’s how scientists are solving the “dinosaur death pose” mystery and others. One bright day in April 2023, Hannah Maddox drove 13 hours from Knoxville, Tennessee, to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research station in the Everglades National Park, near the southern bump of Florida. Her mission was simple: Collect 30 frozen, dead Argentine black
CSI: Cretaceous. A reptile body farm is shedding light on how dinosaurs died. Read More »
The Milky Way’s forecast: mostly cloudy. But the origin of these cosmic clouds is unclear Beyond the bright swirling arms of our Milky Way galaxy, something enormous, mysterious and shadowy barrels toward us. It’s called Smith’s Cloud. And it isn’t like any cloud you’ve seen before. From head to tail, it extends more than 11,000 light-years.
Fast, mysterious clouds swarm around our galaxy Read More »
On a snowy night in 2021, four shivering scientists in Michigan set down their shovels and studied a hand-drawn map by flashlight. The map led to a secret location. They traveled in the dark so no one would spy where they were going. If they dug in the right place, they expected to find a
These ultra-long experiments outlive their scientists — on purpose Read More »
Long explored but infrequently embraced, base 3 computing may yet find a home in cybersecurity. Three, as Schoolhouse Rock!(opens a new tab) told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a stool to stand on its own,
How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary Read More »
The design could lead to adaptable tools to study how fluids move When building devices, engineers mostly use solids, such as metal or plastic. But not a team in China. Their building blocks are drops of water. With those drops, they’ve created a system to study and manage tiny flows of liquids. Best of all,
Lego bricks inspired a new way to shape devices for studying liquids Read More »
From totality to tremendous light shows, our sun put on a shining performance. The sun had a big year in 2024. First, April brought a total solar eclipse that provided a wide swath of the continental U.S. with nearly four minutes of hushed totality. It also gave sun-gazers a chance to observe the outer layers
The Dazzling Sun of 2024 Read More »
