North Korea is back at it. The rogue nation conducted its first missile test in 18 months early Saturday morning (May 4), launching a short-range vehicle east into the Pacific Ocean.   An Earth-observing Dove satellite built by San Francisco-based company Planet Labs happened to be overhead shortly after the launch and captured a stunning... Continue Reading →

The Oral and Genital Herpes Viruses Are Having 'Sex.' The Result Is Worrisome. There's a lot more "sex" going on between the oral and genital herpes viruses than scientists previously thought, according to a new study. The study, published April 23 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, found that the two herpes simplex viruses — known as HSV-1... Continue Reading →

Technology could one day be used to help people who can’t talk to communicate. In an effort to provide a voice for people who can’t speak, neuroscientists have designed a device that can transform brain signals into speech. This technology isn’t yet accurate enough for use outside the lab, although it can synthesize whole sentences... Continue Reading →

Revival of disembodied organs raises slew of ethical and legal questions about the nature of death and consciousness. In a challenge to the idea that brain death is final, researchers have revived the disembodied brains of pigs four hours after the animals were slaughtered. Although the experiments stopped short of restoring consciousness, they raise questions... Continue Reading →

It has four chambers, blood vessels and it beats — sort of. In a first, scientists have 3D printed a heart using human tissue. Though the heart is much smaller than a human's (it's only the size of a rabbit's), and there's still a long way to go until it functions like a normal heart,... Continue Reading →

A few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the hot, young soup of our universe cooled enough for the smallest building blocks of life to combine into atoms for the first time. One balmy, 6,700-degree-Fahrenheit day (3,700 degrees Celsius), a helium atom glommed onto a single proton — actually a positively charged hydrogen ion — and the... Continue Reading →

The Big Bang is commonly thought of as the start of it all: About 13.8 billion years ago, the observable universe went boom and expanded into being. But what were things like before the Big Bang? Short answer: We don't know. Long answer: It could have been a lot of things, each mind-bending in its own way.... Continue Reading →

Deep in the Gulf of California, scientists have discovered a fantastical expanse of hydrothermal vents, full of crystallized gases, glimmering pools of piping-hot fluids and rainbow-hued life-forms. Punctuating it all are towering structures made of minerals from the vents, looming as tall as 75 feet (23 meters). A decade ago, scientists visiting this spot saw... Continue Reading →

On 10 April 2019, the first ever direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published, following observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87's galactic centre. On Wednesday, astronomers announced that they’d captured the world’s first image of a black hole — and the internet... Continue Reading →