On December 20th, 1951, four glowing light bulbs in Arco, Idaho heralded the first use of nuclear power for electricity generation [1]. Today, twenty-nine countries operate nuclear power plants, and these produce about 14% of the world’s electricity [2].…

If you’ve watched the movie The Day after Tomorrow, you must remember the climate-related natural disasters that ravaged the human civilization. Though the events depicted in the movie are unrealistic, we are still dramatically altering Earth’s…

In 2004, Konstantin Novoselov, Andre Geim and their colleagues from Manchester, UK and Chernogolovka, Russia reported the existence of graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon that is 1 atomic layer thick. This discovery took the world by surprise…

-- You may have recently heard of the first person to be cured of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Timothy Ray Brown was HIV-positive and also had acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer that…

-- The past two decades have brought rapid advances in technology that have greatly influenced our daily lives. But have these technologies introduced new health risks along with new conveniences? Unfortunately, the development of electronic gadgets…

-- Hidden deep in the rural villages of sub-Saharan Africa, a neglected tropical disease called African sleeping sickness kills tens of thousands of people every year. Sleeping sickness is caused by a single-celled parasite named Trypanosoma brucei,…

-- In 1932, Winston Churchill predicted that in fifty years “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately.” Now, almost eighty years later, we may finally be getting close…

-- Just as a football game cannot be played with just one person, many tasks performed by cells require multiple players, too. For many bacteria to act as one, proper communication is key. One way of talking to a neighboring bacterium is called quorum…

-- Synthetic biologists are a new breed of researchers: part-scientist, part-engineer. Building on the work of more traditional biologists, synthetic biologists try to use what we know about biology to engineer new functions into living things, such as…

-- Scientists and prostate cancer patients alike cheered when the FDA approved Provenge, the first therapeutic vaccine for prostate cancer, in April 2010. A few months later, a second group of researchers published a clinical study that suggested the…