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An epidermal sheet grown on a fibrin base, like the grafts used to heal a boy’s skin in Germany. (Credit: CMR Unimore) Doctors have replaced the majority of a patient’s damaged skin using genetically-modified grafts. In 2015, a seven-year-old boy was admitted to a German hospital with lesions and blisters across nearly his entire body. He suffered from a rare genetic condition called junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB) that prevents the epidermis, the outermost layer of our ...read more

An artist’s illustration of New Horizons zooming past its next target on New Year’s Day 2019. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Carlos Hernandez) NASA needs your help. The New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto two years ago to much fanfare, is heading towards another, even more distant world — (486958) 2014 MU69. It’s a maddeningly boring name, and it just doesn’t quite capture the adventure, the thrill, the awe of an earthly spacecraft visiting an object over 4 ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Google Street View can pretty much show you every location in the world, even the Faroe Islands thanks to camera-yielding sheep, from the ground. While Satellite View shows us a large-scale aerial of the world, what about what’s in between? Gregory Crutsinger, a scientist who’s worked for drone companies like 3D Robotics and Parrot, recently started a UAV consulting company called Drone Scholars and is leading a citizen scientist drone project c ...read more

A suspension of stem cells in liquid nitrogen. (Credit: Elena Pavlovich/Shutterstock) Tiny brain “organoids,” or clusters of neurons grown from human stem cells, have been implanted into rats. The news comes from Stat, and it seems that two different teams have managed to integrate human brain cells into rat brains. The organoids began stretching out new cells, and even showed signs of activity when the researchers shone lights at the rat’s eyes, a sign that they were fu ...read more

Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream National Park, circa 1965. (Credit: The Jane Goodall Institute) Jane Goodall has been a flashpoint in science circles. Was her years-long study of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania real science? Or was it too subjective to have scientific value? The questions arise anew in the wake of a new documentary, Jane, that looks back at Goodall’s career and how she became a household name in the 1960s. In 1965, her CBS special Miss Goodall and ...read more

After a win, mangrove crabs (Perisesarma eumolpe) will gloat to keep opponents from going for round two. Photo Credit: Marut Sayannikroth/Shutterstock From touchdown dances to victory laps, we all love to bask in the glory after a big win. So do mangrove crabs. After a fierce physical altercation, victorious male crabs sometimes stridulate, planting one claw into the ground and rubbing it vigorously with the other to both visibly and audibly revel in their triumph. But the purpose of ...read more

Image: Flickr/Rick Harris Do you know what you like? That may sound like a dumb question, but disentangling all the different reasons for loving one thing and hating another can be tricky. Take bananas, for instance. Many people pronounce a clear preference for a certain level of ripeness when it comes to their bananas. But is this preference related to the actual taste of bananas of different ripeness, or is due to other cues, such as the shelf life of the banana? Well, here comes the sc ...read more

Every Schizophyllum commune you see is likely a new gender. (Credit: wasanajai/Shutterstock) Gender isn’t really a fungal construct. Where we have two traditionally recognized genders, male and female, some species of fungi can have thousands. It sounds confusing, but it’s actually helpful — with so many variations, the fungi can mate with nearly every individual of their species they meet. It must make for a wild singles night. Sexy Fun Guys One species of fungi, Schizophyll ...read more