Scientists are trying to “de-extinct” the passenger pigeon by modifying the genes of more common pigeons. These birds have been altered so their offspring will be easier to edit with CRISPR. (Credit: Ben Novak)
Ben Novak’s pigeons aren’t much to look at. Cosmetically, they’re not too different from the scavengers you’d see on any city street.
But dive down to the cellular level, and you’ll find something very unusual: they’ve been bred for easier ...read more
(Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock)
Life extension – using science to slow or halt human aging so that people live far longer than they do naturally – may one day be possible.
Big business is taking this possibility seriously. In 2013 Google founded a company called Calico to develop life extension methods, and Silicon Valley billionaires Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have invested in Unity Biotechnology, which has a market cap of US$700 million. Unity Biotechnology focu ...read more
A new study shows that low meat diets, like those followed by pescatarians and vegetarians, use far less water than meat-rich diets. (Credit: Seika Chujo/shutterstock)
The world’s freshwater is in short supply thanks in part to a ballooning global population that uses thousands of liters of water everyday to produce foodstuffs from oil and vegetables to meat, dairy and alcohol. Now researchers have discovered new evidence that a healthy diet, like those followed by pescatarians and veget ...read more
Check out iCivics’ Democracy at Play challenge!
National Constitution Week is September 17-22. To celebrate, we are partnering with iCivics, the nation’s leading provider of civic education, to help America raise its game. The Constitution is the heart of our democracy, but how well do we really know the rights it guarantees? Let’s find out. We’re challenging you to test your Bill of Rights knowledge. It’s easy, fun and FREE. Just cli ...read more
Probiotics might not do as much for our bodies as we assume. (Credit: RomarioIen/shutterstock)
Plenty of people sing the praises of probiotics. These cultures of live bacteria can come in an array of products, from foods like yogurts to dietary supplements and even skin creams. Generally, these products tend to claim they’ll boost health by tweaking your microbiome, the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in and on your body. And sometimes, doctors even encourage pe ...read more
Before deciding to dig up human remains, archaeologists must first ask themselves a complicated set of questions. (Credit: Masarik/shutterstock)
Banana was code for human bones, on one archaeological dig where I’ve worked. We were excavating a cemetery, several thousand years old, and had permits from the appropriate authorities. However, certain religious groups in the area had a history of protesting any destruction of burials, so we kept our work discrete.
We packed excavated skeleton ...read more
This artistically enhanced image shows a Hubble Space Telescope view of the active galaxy Arp 220, which houses a feeding supermassive black hole at its center. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Black holes are by nature difficult to study directly. Because even light cannot escape these massive objects, astronomers must turn to other methods to spot and study them. While information is lost once it crosses a black hole’s event horizon, outside that boundary, it can still escape. A recent study ...read more
This image shows V838 Mon, which exploded as a “red nova” in January 2002, suddenly becoming 600,000 times brighter than our Sun. A similar explosion was expected to occur in 2022, but the unprecedented prediction recently fell through. (Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
It’s time to face a hard truth. Good science is mostly about meticulously testing informed predictions. And, sadly, these predictions often fall flat.
This is exactly what just happened ...read more
