Science News

Manufacturing will soon mean putting the parts in one place - then shaking until they come together, says Skylar Tibbits, head of MIT's Self-Assembly Lab (full text available to subscribers)     

Today on the podcast I talk with Kim Griest, a professor of physics at UC San Diego and professional dark matter hunter. Griest is exploring the possibility that the mysterious gravitational force acting on all the matte...

This space wallpaper shows the region where carbon monoxide snow has formed around the star. The carbon monoxide is shown here in green, and begins at a distance of more than 30 astronomical units from TW Hydrae.

President Obama signed a law today that would help schools stock injectable epinephrine to combat deadly allergic reactions. Nationwide, food allergies have been on the rise.

For many years there has been a feud between researchers about the real-life role of this skull.

After lingering in its birthing bay for nearly six months, an Antarctic iceberg the size of Singapore is finally heading out to sea. Researchers will track the drifting floe, which could disrupt shipping lanes.

Fossils of 3.5-billion-year-old microbes that clung to the seashore of windswept early Earth have been discovered in Australia. The rocks may be the oldest evidence of life on Earth yet found.

Procrastination, as you may have figured out by now, is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to urgent ones. Or, doing pleasurable tasks in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus delaying perfor...

To combat elephant poaching, the United States is preparing to publicly pulverize its 6-ton stockpile of illicit ivory this week, which has likely left many wondering, why not just sell it instead?

Plants and animals fight each other with poisons, and sometimes, humans can take advantage of these evolutionary battles. The "good" side of poison includes chocolate, coffee and an increasing number of medical drugs, ac...

The car-size Curiosity rover went into safe mode Thursday, a few hours after receiving a software update from its handlers on Earth. But mission engineers identified and fixed the problem, allowing Curiosity to resume no...

FOXES can be tamed deliberately, by selective breeding (see article). But this probably recapitulates a process that happened accidentally, many millennia ago, to wolves. The product of that was the animal now known as t...

Different brain cells respond to different musical notes, so patterns of brain activity can show what song you are listening to     

From Ghana to India, citizens are using online open data to hold governments to account - with great success     

Imagining playing the piano or running around can improve your manual dexterity. This could help people think their way back to health after a stroke     

Fossils have painted an often colorful and sometimes feathery picture of what dinosaurs looked like in their heyday, but almost nothing is known about the brains of man's favorite Jurassic beasts. Drawing from the brain ...

If you want to catch a firefly, any old glass jar will do. But when you're trying to bottle a star--the goal of fusion energy research--the bottle needs to be very special. A tokamak is one type of fusion bottle, capable...

In a collaborative effort, researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom have developed a new technique that will help them optimize the transport barrier, or pedestal, in fusion plasmas, which will be key to i...

Travel Advisories The magnet wouldn't fit through tollbooths, so an all-highway route wouldn't work. And if it fell from a helicopter through power lines, it could cause a blackout. Waterways were the only option. The jo...

Researchers have found a way to get quantum bits to last long enough to do computations with, using the magnetic properties of a rare earth element called holmium and the symmetry of platinum.

Although oxygen is required to sustain life, oxygen sucks the life out of fusion by radiating away too much power from the high-temperature plasma. Accordingly, great efforts are expended to reduce the oxygen found in fu...

Recent experiments provide the first assessment of the toughness of a novel lithium coating in the face of intense bombardment by very hot plasma in the divertor region of fusion devices. The results show that this coati...