Microscopy advances set the stage for mobile disease detection, nimble nanostructures and more. ...read more

In recent days, two powerful storms packing hurricane-force winds have spun up in the North Atlantic. You can watch them in the animation above of GOES-16 satellite imagery. It was posted to the awesome GOES-16 Loop of the Day website. The storm closer to North America was so strong that it churned the waters up into stupendous waves higher than 60 feet tall: https://twitter.com/NWSOPC/status/965872247864004608 That would be almost high enough to inundate the White House. Here ...read more

It turns out more than just Apple employees are crashing into the Apple campus. (Seriously, they're running into its glass walls) A drone pilot recently crashed a drone at Apple Park — Apple's spaceship-like headquarters in Cupertino, California. Unfortunately, the pilot didn't know where the precious drone crash-landed, so he recruited a fellow drone operator to help. Matthew Roberts, known for his drone videos documenting the development of Apple Park, and his DJI Ph ...read more

Many of us are familiar with the phrases “water is life” and “every drop counts,” but may still take our access to clean water for granted. Not until incidents like the lead poisoning of Flint residents or Cape Town running out of water do we become truly thankful for being able to turn on our taps and immediately drink the water that comes out of them. Incidents like those in Flint and Cape Town serve as constant reminders of how precious water is and that we should do w ...read more

For all its precise helical structure, the DNA inside our cells is a mess. When a cell isn't preparing for the process of splitting itself in two, our DNA lies in a massive tangle inside the cell nucleus; a strand more than six feet in length jumbled like an earbud cord. But when it comes time to undergo cellular division, this disorderly strand must be packaged neatly into chromosomes to be passed onto daughter cells — stuffed into a space much tighter than before. Around and Around To ...read more

If you still think Neanderthals were dull-witted brutes, you simply aren’t woke. In 1856, laborers in a limestone quarry in Germany’s Neander Valley unearthed a skull cap that belonged to our closest evolutionary ancestor, and from the start we asserted our intellectual superiority over our thick-skulled cousins. To this day, the hunched-over, doltish caveman stereotype persists, an image that likely stems from Marcellin Boule’s reconstruction of a mostly complete, geriatric N ...read more

"What happens if grocery retailers can help you put a fresh dinner on the table faster than pizza delivery and cheaper than restaurant delivery?" That vision comes from CommonSense Robotics, an Israeli startup with plans to open its first AI-run fulfillment centers staffed by both robots and human workers in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom before the end of 2018. Such a service could help local grocery stores survive the coming onslaught from Amazon's aggres ...read more

A new medical paper raises complex questions over ethics and human rights, as it reports on a study that took place in a religious camp where mentally ill patients were chained up for long periods. The paper's called Joining psychiatric care and faith healing in a prayer camp in Ghana and it's out now in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The authors are a Ghanian-British-American team led by Dr Angela Ofori-Atta. In Ghana, the authors explain, there are just 25 psychiatrists to cater ...read more

Can we predict the course evolution will take? That's the question an international team of researchers decided to tackle, using a quarter-century of stick insect observations. Comparing the first half of the data set to the latter half, they set out to see if they could forecast the path of natural selection. Take A Guess As it turns out, it's really hard. The researchers were able to predict some simple evolutionary changes, but the rest were subject to forces they couldn't account fo ...read more

A review of the research on genetically engineered corn concludes that the benefits appear to outweigh the drawbacks. In a meta-analysis, where researchers synthesize the findings of many studies, researchers from the University of Pisa and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies look at papers on genetically engineered (GE) corn from between 1996 and 2016. They were looking for research on crop yields, grain quality, impacts on other organisms and how well the corn degraded in fields af ...read more