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

Red wine colors your tongue, but your teeth may not mind a little juice of the vine. Sipping moderate—keyword, moderate—amounts of wine on a regular basis can be good for your colon, heart, immune system and mental health. Wine, after all, was at the core of the so-called “French paradox,” or the observation in 1980 that cardiovascular disease was far less prevalent among the French, despite their penchant for saturated fats, low activity levels and cigarettes. The outli ...read more

The truth is out there, but if it doesn’t come from “my side” who cares? In an era of “fake news” our relationship status with factual knowledge, and a shared reality has changed to “it’s complicated”. Democracies depend on informed populations, but objective truth has of late taken a back seat to partisanship. In an essay published in Cell Press Reviews, New York University psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira attempt to demystify how p ...read more

Mr. Steven is expected to save SpaceX millions of dollars. Mr. Steven, by the way, is a giant boat with a net. Building and launching reliable rockets into space is a costly endeavor, and SpaceX has been hellbent on bringing those costs down since the rocket company...launched. Until recently, spent rockets could only be used once. But Elon Musk, CEO and founder of SpaceX, has proven rockets are reusable, and can coordinate a simultaneous landing. But the cost-cutting can go even further. ...read more