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If you want to admire the beauty behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics – topological phases of matter, take a course in topology, followed by graduate-level solid state physics. But if you ask for a concrete application of this topic, you now have an…

Anyone who has seen Star Wars envisions the future of visual displays as “holograms,” where 3D objects materialize out of light in thin air. However, anyone who has looked at a true hologram will likely have been disappointed at the reality.  Not only…

No, we won’t be seeing designer babies anytime soon. But scientists have successfully cloned monkeys for the first time, establishing a technique that could be used to create better disease models using primates, the closest animals to humans. These…

by Veerasak “Jeep” Srisuknimit figures by Jovana Andrejevic Our time with antibiotics is running out. In 2016, a woman in Nevada died from a bacterial infection caused by Klebsiella pneumoniae that was resistant to all available antibiotics. Bacteria…

by Fernanda Ferreira figures by Brad Wierbowski Every day 140 Americans die from an opioid overdose. To confront the crisis, not only must opioid addiction treatment become more readily available, but new and improved forms of treatment must also be…

Two bears and a mountain lion suffered extreme burns to their paws during the California wildfires in December. Treating the animals with the traditional procedures was proving difficult, so vets turned to an experimental treatment: fish skin bandages.…

The closest ancestors of modern-day humans (Homo sapiens) and other subspecies of the genus Homo are thought to have originated in Eastern Africa around 2.85 million years ago. Archaeologists interested in the link between the earliest members of the…

by Anqi Zhang figures by Daniel Utter What do you think of the idea of inserting a long metal wire into your brain? That’s what doctors have done to ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease over the past 20 years. Sound scary? A new technique called…

The discovery of CRISPR/Cas9 is one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory. This technology, first discovered in microbes, enables the cleaving of DNA in order to remove or replace existing genes. For a crash course into the history of…

Many diseases are caused by genetic mutations. Small mutations can cause certain cancers, some cases of blindness, influence heart disease, and many other pathologies. A new and powerful technology called CRISPR-Cas9 aims to correct for these genetic…