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-- Despite our best efforts to wash our hands and keep raw meat separate from other ingredients while cooking, over 76 million Americans per year become ill from foodborne bacteria or the toxins produced by them. The bacterial culprits are typically E.…

-- If you believe Hollywood’s interpretation, the advent of intelligent robots rarely ends well for mankind. Movies like The Matrix, Terminator, and I, Robot all depict robots as quite intelligent, capable, and horrifyingly destructive machines that…

-- The world is excited about solar cells – and with good reason. Imagine the City of the Future, where every exposed surface has solar cells on it, converting the sun’s energy into electricity. This vision could include solar cells on windows, on top of…

-- If every cell in an organism has the same genetic program, how can there be so many different types of cells in one body? The answer lies in the fact that not all genes are turned on or expressed in every cell. Determining which genes are turned on…

-- While sitting in your elementary school classroom or making some amorphous jelly mold studded with jelly beans, you may have heard the phrase “mighty mitochondria” from your studies on the cell structures. More than just a catchy alliteration, this…

-- For the first time, recent advances in technology and space exploration have made the prospect of detecting evidence for life outside of our Solar System a foreseeable possibility. The pursuit of this evidence and the desire to learn more about the…

-- Itchy, watery eyes, and a drippy nose. Constricted, swollen airways secreting thick mucus. Itchy, red, dry, cracked skin. These symptoms describe three conditions — allergies, asthma, and eczema, respectively — that are commonly found together in the…

Dr. Elizabeth Barron holds a joint appointment as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and in the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.…

When we think of biodiversity management, or maintaining the species diversity in an area, it’s easy to draw parallels to conservation. However, conservation usually focuses on one or few species at a time. This means that it often doesn’t mesh well with…

Adapted from image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The World is Full of Bacteria There are over a billion microbes in just one liter of ocean water [1]. The same goes for a liter of soil. As the human population reaches 7 billion individuals…