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by Lisa Heppler figures by Jovana Andrejevic Weightlessness is something many of us have dreamed about since we were kids. We have seen footage of astronauts floating around the International Space Station playing Ping-Pong with balls of water and…

A machine learning algorithm trained using 500,000 genetic profiles can predict the height of an individual within about one inch based solely on their genes. Such an algorithm shows great promise for accurate risk assessment of complex diseases and…

You’ve probably heard that cigarettes are bad for you, and it has always been a safe bet to assume that they’re bad for the environment too. A comprehensive analysis of the entire tobacco supply chain by researchers at the Imperial College of London…

If you travel into deep space and look back at Earth through a sophisticated telescope, you could measure what’s called the vegetation red edge (VRE). The vegetation red edge is a mixture of red and infrared light that is reflected by plants on Earth’s…

by Trevor Haynes figures by Daniel Utter “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.” – Louis Pasteur Today’s world is extremely interconnected. Most of us take this…

It’s that time of year – Nobel Prize season! This year, the Chemistry Nobel prize was awarded to three scientists: one half to Frances Arnold “for the directed evolution of enzymes,” and the other half to George Smith and Sir Gregory Winter “for the…

by Jamilla Akhund-Zade figures by Rebecca Senft Anyone who has had the misfortune of missing a night of sleep would not need convincing that sleep is important for well-being. Decades of studies concur with what is already commonly known – sleep…

This summer, heat waves hit the Northern Hemisphere with temperatures upward of 100°F, highlighting one of the biggest current worldwide challenges: keeping buildings (and the people inside them) cool. A group of researchers from Columbia University may…

As kids, we are taught about the existence of prime numbers: numbers that are only divisible by themselves and one. The first few are easy to recognize just by counting: two, three, five… But the larger the counting goes, the less obvious the prime. The…

Human stem cells are specialized cells that can be harvested from the body and engineered to turn into various tissues and organs. Perhaps the greatest potential use of stem cells is the generation of new tissues for organ transplants. Unfortunately,…