Researchers in Oregon claim to have solved the tricky problem of cloning human stem cells, but you're more likely to see a duplicate of a years-old ethics debate — destroyed embryos or lives saved, Bush bans or Obama battles — than you are a duplicate human.
Just when moral vegetarians thought their meal of choice wasn't sentient, it turns out that plants can totally talk to each other. Even weirder, they communicate through underground fungi. So mushrooms aren't cool to eat, either. Sorry.
Harmless scientific marvel though it may be, the summer of bug love has arrived — perhaps entering your backyard or urban escape as soon as this weekend — and it's pretty gross. For those of you with a fear of flying insects, it's downright terrifying. Here's a handy guide for East Coast entomophobes, with the help of the Internet's ultimate cicada expert.
Fertile lovers a plus, gills a must and relocation fees included — only other Mangarahara cichlids or Ptychochromis Insolitus, need apply.
Unlock your doors, take off the foil hats, and stop worrying about the White House—everything science fiction movies have taught you about alien invasions is wrong. Except, of course, if the only thing you know about aliens is E.T., then everything you know is right: Aliens aren't going to plop down on Earth and blow us into smithereens, sciencee says a Finnish economist swears.
Oversharing is widely deplored and highly criticized, and those who commit the crime are often themselves considered affronts to good taste. Maybe they can't help it. Also, couldn't it be worse? Beware the undershare!
The very horny and very loud insects haven't arrived in full force for the Mid-Atlantic cicada sex invasion quite yet, but when they do, they will come with a huge body-count advantage over people, outnumbering us 600-to-1, or maybe even 20,000-to-1.
People of the Acela corridor: The time to prepare for four to six weeks of the little six-legged sexual power saws is over. People of America: The invasion is here. Prepare your backyards — and your ears.
Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital say they have successfully "grown" a kidney in a laboratory environment and transplanted it back into a healthy animal, raising the tantalizing possibility of a future with organs grown in lab dishes — and a potential end to donor shortages.
Like any other discovery involving ancient dinosaurs, Wednesday's announcement presents a very important question: What does this have to do with re-making Jurassic Park, and more than just in 3-D? The authors of a new study published in Nature aren't too optimistic.
The bugs are coming for the Super Bowl of cicada mating season, and they are due to arrive, up and out of your trees and with the sexual sounds of a power saw, sometime very soon. Here's an illustrated entomological guide.
"I like small penises," said no women interviewed for an actually scientific study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. Yes, PNAS is a funny sounding acronym, and, yes, PNAS has found that size does matter — and that women prefer "showers" to "growers."
One of conservatives' favorite examples of wasteful government spending in recent weeks has been a study of duck penises. This is dumb, and Newt Gingrich knows it: They should promote the very type of technological innovation made possible by the weird science research the party is currently dismissing as silly and wasteful.
Tim McDaniel, an 18-year vetaran of the biology department at the public school in Dietrcich, Idaho, might have to figure out how to teach the miracle of life to his high-school students without saying the word "vagina" after a group of unhappy parents found the word offensive
Today in viral videos: We applaud one young man's legendary YouTube plea to the deity that is Kate Upton, the lowdown on the microbes all over your body, and an exit strategy in case everything doesn't work out.
Scientists at the European Space Agency have released the "oldest" picture we have of our universe, revealing a map of cosmic radiation that shows what our skies looked like at the very earliest moments of creation.
There's a sad lesson about urban planning in the trend of major archaeological finds turning up under parking lots in the United Kingdom. Or maybe it's a happy lesson. It's hard to tell.
Medical researchers dropped their microscopes on Sunday when a team of doctors from Mississippi revealed that an infant in their care was born with HIV and cured two years later. Dr. Hannah Gay, who treated the baby, dropped the mic.
William Shatner's had quite the colorful post-Star Trek career, a career that now includes not only being a spoken word poet but also naming one of Pluto's moons after Spock's home planet, Vulcan.
It's always been tough to understand how babies' brains work, since they can't talk and don't take well to being stuffed into an MRI machine. But new technology is changing all that.
If you're eating mixed greens right now, you might want to stop for a second, because news that a fourth of all food-borne illnesses come from leafy vegetables might put a bad taste in your mouth.
Today in viral videos: Shaq really enjoyed the halftime show, the YouTube clip that inspired Dodge's farmer ad, and Community gets even more epic.
Scientists in England have announced that they can now conclusively say that a skeleton found under a parking lot in Great Britain last year belongs to the Richard III, the famous king who was killed (without his horse!) more than 500 years ago.
Today in viral videos: Jimmy Kimmel proves that the meek shall inherit Twitter, Christian Bale restores our faith in humanity, and the scientific explanation behind the chicken and the egg.
We all got to witness the freak occurrence of an actual snake on an actual freakin' plane this week. And while news of the scrub python quickly spread from the side of a Qantas flight to YouTube, actual scientists are pretty used to this sort of thing. Seriously. We asked a real-life snake detective.
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
It was impressive when we recently learned that dogs could be trained to sniff out cancer and on-coming seizures. But did you know that dogs can also smell fluctuations in your blood sugar?
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
There's a new smell out there, folks. Well, the smell has existed before now, as smells do, but finally it has a way to make itself known in words. This smell has been dubbed "olfactory white" by scientists, writes Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience, "because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise."
This Friday, hoards of Americans will line up, and wait, and fight, and at way-too-early-for-a-day-off hours, to get discounts that studies have shown aren't even the best deals around—and they'll do it because of reasons outside of their control.
We don't have to sift for clues that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is pretty much already running for president, because in the 13 days since the 2012 election—and especially the last three—he's given us several obvious tip-offs about his destiny, and that of the Republican Party, come 2016.
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
Discovered: The temperature at which malaria thrives; 140 billion cubic meters of gas goes up in flames every year; seafloor methane could rise; could iron boost fish populations?
If your colleagues were sentenced to jail for failing to predict the future, you'd probably be upset too. On Tuesday, some of Italy's top scientists resigned from the government's disaster agency to protest the manslaughter conviction of seven seismologists for failing to predict the devastating earthquake in L'Aquila in 2009.
Gaga: pop star, activist, fern.
A new study connects a lack of sleep to increased obesity and diabetes by showing how sleep deprivation can hurt people on a cellular level.
A new study shoots big holes in one of the major criticisms of the HPV vaccine, by showing that young girls don't become more promiscuous after getting shots to protect against the sexually transmitted disease.
Astronomers today have figured out that 55 Cancri e, a planet that's double Earth's size, is largely made of diamonds. Pretty awesome news for gem hunters, but first we need to figure out how to build a warp drive and survive 3,900 degrees Farenheit to get there.
Dr. Robert J. Lefkowitz and Dr. Brian K. Kobilka are the reason drug makers can and will make drugs with fewer side effects, and after 40 years spent studying the body's protein receptors, they have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The Higgs boson discovery didn't win the Nobel Prize in Physics this year despite being the sexiest and perhaps the most significant physics discovery in the last 50 years. You might even be asking yourself why and pondering the meaning of life now that the Nobel jury didn't recognize the God Particle. Don't fret, we've got some answers.
The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the United States, who both made unique advances in quantum optics, allowing scientists the first chance observe quantum particles in the physical world.
Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and John Gurdon of England have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, kicking off a big for the most-coveted awards in the world.
A sexy little rumor (for physicists) has popped up on the internet just days ahead of when the committee is expected to announce the Nobel Prize on October 9: the Higgs boson team might not be a shoe-in for the win, as a theory on "quantum teleportation" emerges as a contender.
Beekeepers in Ribeauville, France, were puzzled about why their bees were producing honey that came out green and blue ... until they found a biogas plant processing Mars candy waste some two-and-a-half miles away.
On Friday the news of a certain study was making the Internet rounds, pleasing an array of people who seemed to take it as support that all this "feminism" and "gender equality" stuff was a bunch of bunk, that women should really be in the kitchen, doing housework, if they expected their marriages to remain marriages and not head toward divorce post-haste.
Maybe this is why the science industry is so male-dominated: Turns out science professors think more highly of male students.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
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