While Mark Post, physiology chair at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, shares Mironov’s optimism about in vitro meat’s potential, he says the future isn’t in at-home devices.“Quite frankly, I don’t see that as a very pragmatic solution,” says Post, whose name has become synonymous with the movement. He debuted his lab-produced meat (cost: $325,000 per burger) in a highly publicized taste test in London in 2013.Instead, the focus now is on ramping up ef ...read more

Once upon a time in Asia Minor, people started to tell the tale of The Smith and the Devil. The plot was simple: A craftsman trades his soul for supernatural power, then uses his magic to trap the diabolical creature with whom he made the deal. Folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, have long assumed the story, as well as other tales such as Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, is ancient. Now, there’s firm evidence for that from Durham University anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani an ...read more

In His Own Words ... It’s the summer after my first year of graduate school, and I’m with a pilot, a sub tech and two deep-sea biologists. One is Craig Young, now the director of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, and the other is Paul Tyler. And Paul Tyler literally wrote the book on deep-sea biology. It’s literally called Deep-Sea Biology. These guys, in my field, are famous. So not only is it my first research trip and my first submersible dive, I’m with two peopl ...read more

The impact of clean-burning stoves on global health. We tend to take our modern gas and electric stoves and ovens for granted, but in many countries, homes have only kerosene or solid-fuel cooking stoves, which can pollute household air. Each year, more than 4 million people die globally of complications from inhaling smoke from these stoves. In a study on the risks, researchers found that clean ethanol-burning stoves are healthier than traditional units. They monitored 324 healthy pregnant ...read more