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By Heidi Ledford The first time molecular biologist Greg Hannon flew through a tumour, he was astonished — and inspired. Using a virtual-reality model, Hannon and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge, UK, flew in and out of blood vessels, took stock of infiltrating immune cells and hatched an idea for an unprecedented tumour …
By Colin Dwyer To paraphrase an age-old saying: If at first you don’t succeed, well, dust off the historic launch pad and try another liftoff. Not as catchy as the original, perhaps, but certainly fitting for SpaceX, which succeeded Sunday on its second launch attempt at NASA’s Launch Complex 39A, at Kennedy Space Center in …
By Scott Waldman Lawmakers are remaking NASA in order to leave parts of the agency’s earth science program untouched but remove its climate change research. It’s still unclear exactly how lawmakers plan to transform NASA’s mission, but Republicans and Trump administration officials have said they want the agency to focus on deep-space missions and away …
By James Gallagher Brain scans can detect autism long before any symptoms start to emerge, say scientists. The earliest that children tend to be diagnosed at present is at the age of two, although it is often later. The study, published in the journal Nature, showed the origins of autism are much earlier than that …
By David Shepardson, Timothy Gardner and Richard Valdmanis | WASHINGTON Staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have been told that President Donald Trump is preparing a handful of executive orders to reshape the agency, to be signed once a new administrator is confirmed, two sources who attended the meeting told Reuters on Wednesday. A …
By Hemant Mehta The Jackson County Board of Commissioners in Michigan never understood how invocation prayers worked. They delivered it themselves, which they can’t do. The invocations were always Christian, which constituted government endorsement of religion. And when resident Peter Bormuth (a Pagan) pointed all this out during a 2013 meeting, the Commissioners dismissed his concerns. …
By Jocelyn Kaiser Editing the DNA of a human embryo to prevent a disease in a baby could be ethically allowable one day—but only in rare circumstances and with safeguards in place, says a widely anticipated report released today. The report from an international committee convened by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and …
By Steven Novella We have an anti-vaccine president. One of my concerns about Trump the candidate was that one of his most consistent positions over the years was blaming vaccines for the alleged autism epidemic (there isn’t one, by the way). Once elected it did not take long for this to manifest as a policy …
By Michael Shermer Imagine nothing. Go ahead. What do you see? I picture dark empty space devoid of galaxies, stars and planets. But not only would there be no matter, there would be no space or time either. Not even darkness. And no sentient life to observe the nothingness. Just … nothing. Picture that. You …
By Philip Ball Researchers at IBM have created an elusive molecule by knocking around atoms using a needle-like microscope tip. The flat, triangular fragment of a mesh of carbon atoms, called triangulene1, is too unstable to be made by conventional chemical synthesis, and could find use in electronics. This isn’t the first time that atomic …
By David G. McAfee Skepticism has always been important: it helped our ancestors outsmart predators, and it continues to help us avoid other dangerous pitfalls even today. But there is perhaps no time in recent history in which this skeptical mindset is more urgent than now. I’ve spent my entire adult life promoting skepticism of …
By Annie Sneed Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail of seismology. After all, quakes are deadly precisely because they’re erratic—striking without warning, triggering fires and tsunamis, and sometimes killing hundreds of thousands of people. If scientists could warn the public weeks or months in advance that a large temblor is coming, evacuation and other preparations …