Sequencing DNA from individual cells is changing the way that researchers think of humans as a whole.
Can a few neurons trigger a full memory? In a new study, published in Nature, a group of researchers from MIT showed for the first time that it is possible to activate a memory on demand, by stimulating only a few neurons with light, using a technique known as optogenetics. Optogenetics is a powerful technology…
Recently, one of the four 8.2-metre telescopes that make up the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope captured the brief but brilliant light of a distant explosion, a gamma-ray burst. The light from the burst passed through its host galaxy and another nearby galaxy before reaching Earth, providing Sandra Savaglio of the Max-Planck Institute for…
Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the U.S. shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising clever laboratory experiments that made it possible to control ghostly quantum particles, an achievement that many theoretical physicists believed could never be done. The work has already led to the creation of clocks more than 100…
A new biofuel production process created by Michigan State University researchers produces energy more than 20 times higher than existing methods. The results, published in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology, showcase a novel way to use microbes to produce biofuel and hydrogen, all while consuming agricultural wastes. Gemma Reguera, MSU microbiologist, has…
Millions of tons of tiny bits of plastic float in giant patches — or gyres — in oceans around the world. There are five large patches of plastic. One of them, the North Pacific Gyre, is roughly twice the size of the United States. All of them are a problem. These bits of plastic look…
The smallest mammoth ever known to have existed roamed the island of Crete millions of years ago, researchers say. Adults were roughly the size of a modern baby elephant, standing over a metre tall at the shoulders. Remains were discovered more than a century ago, but scientists had debated whether the animal was a mammoth…