Science News

The finalists in the DARPA Robotics Challenge faced off this weekend in a series of eight tasks meant to tease out which machines had the right stuff to help humans respond to natural and man-made disasters. Here's a loo...

Cells have devised many structures for transporting molecular cargo across their protective borders, but the nuclear pore complex, with its flower-like, eight-fold symmetry, stands out. Monstrously large by cellular stan...

Busting open protons to get to the stuff inside could tell us how matter gets its mass, why we're all here - and maybe even how to make a real lightsaber (full text available to subscribers)

At very small scales, engineering becomes indistinguishable from video game design, claims Colin Milburn in his new book. Should science open itself up to play?

A robotics team from South Korea took home the $2 million first-place prize in a competition this weekend to design robots that could aid humans in a natural or manmade disaster.

Oesophageal cancer rates in men have increased by 50 per cent since the early 1980s. In women, the increase is much smaller with around 10 per cent more now developing the disease compared to the 80s, research shows.

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for chromosomal fetal disorders is used increasingly to test for conditions such as Down's syndrome. NIPT examines DNA from the fetus in the mother's blood, and therefore does not car...

Although non-invasive prenatal testing carries a much lower risk of miscarriage than do invasive tests, it is slightly less accurate, because it only analyses DNA from the outer layers of the placenta. In some cases a tr...

Thoracic aortic aneurysm and dissection (TAAD), an enlargement or tearing of the walls of the aorta in the chest, is, together with abdominal aortic aneurysms, responsible for about 2% of all deaths in Western countries....

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for Down's syndrome is feasible, acceptable to parents, and could be introduced into the National Health Service (NHS), UK researchers say.