Tiny ‘xenobots’ assembled from cells promise advances from drug delivery to toxic waste clean-up A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need. Now a team of … Continued
The site will house up to 2,000 people and break ground in 2021 Toyota wants to give a new meaning to the term “company town.” The Japanese auto giant said it will transform the 175-acre site of a former car … Continued
They’ll reportedly last for thousands of years. This technology may someday power spacecraft, satellites, high-flying drones, and pacemakers. Nuclear energy is carbon free, which makes it an attractive and practical alternative to fossil fuels, as it doesn’t contribute to global … Continued
The desperate search for ways to help the world’s coral reefs rebound from the devastating effects of climate change has given rise to some radical solutions. In the Caribbean, researchers are cultivating coral “nurseries” so they can reimplant fresh coral … Continued
Submerged sculptures and others that appear at low tide to be installed at several Queensland sites, as part of a project that also aims to rehabilitate sections of the reef From a colour-changing figure warning of warming seas to a … Continued
Consider this schedule: At 8 a.m. you arrive at work. Immediately you are busy with a quick problem needing to be solved. You sit and get to it, but only for about three minutes. You break your focus to stop … Continued
Greenhouse gas emissions could be halved in the next decade if a small number of current technologies and behavioural trends are ramped up and adopted more widely, researchers have found, saying strong civil society movements are needed to drive such change. … Continued
Clusters of living brain cells are teaching scientists about diseases like autism. With a new finding, some experts wonder if these organoids may become too much like the real thing. Two hundred and fifty miles over Alysson Muotri’s head, a … Continued
Back in 2017, neuroscientists used a classic branch of maths in a totally new way to peer into the structure of our brains. What they discovered is that the brain is full of multi-dimensional geometrical structures operating in as many … Continued
IN 2010, EMILY Whitehead was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a cancer of certain cells in the immune system. THIS IS THE most common form of childhood cancer, her parents were told, and Emily had a good chance to beat it with … Continued
Aha experiences aren’t as serendipitous as you may think. Here’s how to proactively produce them. It’s the third century, B.C., and the King of Syracuse is suspicious. He has commissioned a new gold crown. But upon receiving the crown from … Continued
The question of how life first emerged here on Earth is a mystery that continues to elude scientists. Despite everything that scientists have learned from the fossil record and geological history, it is still not known how organic life emerged … Continued
A Royal Dutch Shell Plc-operated carbon capture and storage project in Canada has hit a milestone of sequestering 4 million tons of carbon dioxide about six months ahead of schedule and at a lower cost than estimated, helped by better-than-expected reliability. … Continued
Plants make up 80 percent, but human activity chopped that number in half over the last 10,000 years The human population on Earth is about 7.6 billion people (and counting). But according to a new global census of biomass, humans … Continued
Indigenous Australian claims to be the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth have been backed up by the first extensive testing of their DNA. Their origins date back more than 50,000 years to the Old Stone Age, according to the research. Scientists … Continued
South Australia has recently put the world’s biggest lithium battery into operation – but perhaps it should’ve waited. A local startup says it’s built the world’s first working thermal battery, a device with a lifetime of at least 20 years that can … Continued
A new scientific study points toward lifelong neuron formation in the human brain’s hippocampus, with implications for memory and disease. Not everyone was convinced. Arturo Alvarez-Buylla was the senior author on last year’s Nature paper, which questioned the existence of neurogenesis. Alvarez-Buylla, … Continued
DNA is spelled out with four letters, or bases. Researchers have now built a system with eight. It may hold clues to the potential for life elsewhere in the universe and could also expand our capacity to store digital data … Continued
The Pentagon thinks bugs could hold the secrets to conscious experience. The Pentagon’s emerging technologies unit put out a call last week for proposals that use insect brains to control robots — because they could be used to create efficient new models for … Continued
Algorithms are increasingly being used to make ethical decisions. Perhaps the best example of this is a high-tech take on the ethical dilemma known as the trolley problem: if a self-driving car cannot stop itself from killing one of two … Continued