Science

In a series of papers released on Sunday, researchers showed that it’s possible to reduce many of the problems with age, including declines in memory and loss of muscle strength, simply by supplying older mice with blood plasma from younger ones. The work even identified a specific protein, GDF11, that mediates many of the effects. Continue Reading →

Elon Musk just announced a significant milestone for SpaceX and, well, humanity. The first live test of a Falcon 9 rocket boost stage landing vertically was a success. The first stage of the rocket returned to Earth and landed vertically in the Atlantic Ocean after boosting the second stage to a resupply mission with the Continue Reading →

Will my baby be healthy? It’s a question that concerns every prospective parent. Now a service that creates digital embryos by virtually mixing two people’s DNA will give a clearer glimpse of their possible child’s health, and perhaps much more – before it has been conceived. The Matchright technology will be available in two US Continue Reading →

On a small moon of Saturn, hidden beneath nearly 25 miles of ice, researchers say they have identified an underground ocean of water that’s at least as large as Lake Superior, the largest of North America’s Great Lakes. The ocean was found at the south pole of Enceladus, a tiny moon about as wide as Continue Reading →

Cool Planet, a startup headquartered in Colorado, announced a major $100 million round of financing on Monday. Investors include a roster of big names including Google Ventures, BP, General Electric, and ConocoPhillips. Last month the company broke ground on its first commercial plant, located in Louisiana, and this new capital will go towards completing that Continue Reading →

Synthetic biology has come a long way in recent years. In the last two decades alone, scientists have been able to go from synthesizing the genome of a relatively small virus, Hepatitis C, to creating what researchers refer to as the “first synthetic cell” from a unicellular organism. Yet until recently, researchers had been incapable Continue Reading →

IBM and the New York Genome Center announced a partnership to test whether Watson, the computer that won on Jeopardy, can sift through the genomes of cancer patients and help doctors pick drugs. This effort could hold the key to making DNA sequencing for cancer affordable, but there is a vast amount of work to Continue Reading →

A piece of food falls on the floor. Do you toss it out – or immediately pick it up and eat it, claiming the “five-second rule”? The idea that food is still relatively germ-free if it’s been on the floor for less than five seconds has been more of a pop-culture theory than something science Continue Reading →

NASA is plotting a daring robotic mission to Jupiter’s watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be some form of life. The space agency set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial Continue Reading →

When we first broached the Great Smiley Debate a few weeks ago, the question was whether or not a dash-as-nose was appropriate, necessary, or a bastardization of the simple purity of two dots paired with a gentle curve. But a new, equally contentious controversy emerged in the Kinja discussion: Should the parenthesis open towards the Continue Reading →