Are viruses life forms or not? Scientists have been fighting about it for years, and Anthony has more on the latest wrinkle in this seemingly simple yet age-old debate.
Health apps are hot, but until now the field has been unregulated. It is hard to know which apps actually live up to their claims or provide accurate information. Now, the FDA is laying down the law, releasing a first draft of guidelines that require developers making medical claims to apply for FDA approval. But app developers are bristling.
Astronomers have detected an alien planet that may be capable of supporting life as we know it — and it’s just a stone’s throw from Earth in the cosmic scheme of things. The newfound exoplanet, a so-called “super-Earth” called HD 40307g, is located inside its host star’s habitable zone, a just-right range of distances where…
A peek at swirling matter around a giant black hole verifies that it is the source of a monstrous blast of energy thousands of light-years long, researchers say. Bursts of energy known as relativistic jets spew out matter at close to the speed of light. These jets can travel across an entire galaxy, suggesting they…
At last, a member of the celebrated sirtuin family of proteins has been shown to extend lifespan in mammals — although it’s not the one that has received the most attention and financial investment. Sirtuin genes and the proteins they encode have intrigued many researchers who study aging ever since they were first linked to…
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests. “It’s a staggering number, if you think about it,” lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “Basically there’s one of these planets per star.” Swift and his colleagues arrived…
A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher, and a scholar walk into an auditorium. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but the group came together for the latest Intelligence Squared U.S. debate and faced off two against two on the motion “The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion.” Author…