Latest in: Research
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At 2 pm EDT (6 pm UTC) this Thursday, NASA will have a big Mars announcement to make. As with most announcements of announcements, they’ve only released a few details, but we do know that the “live discussion” will talk about “new science results from NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover”. So what... -
Mankind’s quest to become an interplanetary species is a bold one that will have a lot of challenges in the coming decades, not simply in terms of technology or creating a colony on an alien planet, but also because space has drastic effects on the human body. As we... -
The moon formed from a disk-shaped clump of debris in the aftermath of a planet-sized collision with a very early Earth… at least that’s the commonly held theory. But now, a new study conducted by Harvard researchers proposes a completely new scenario for how the moon first formed. Simon... -
Last week, it was announced that Chinese scientists accomplished a genetic landmark: the cloning of two monkeys. The two identical long-tailed macaques, named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, were born two weeks apart and cloned from the connective tissue cells of monkey fetuses, according to the study published in the scientific... -
On Friday morning, commercial space company SpaceX is due to send a spacecraft full of supplies and science projects up to the International Space Station, and you can watch all the excitement live on NASA’s website. The broadcast is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. ET to accommodate the launch window,... -
Traveling in space makes our immune systems weaker—and as if that weren’t bad enough already, it might also make bacteria better able to resist the drugs we use to beat them back. That’s why several NASA projects have focused on studying how bacteria behave in space. The newest such project is... -
The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system allows scientists to permanently alter the human genome faster and more precisely than ever before (see Sep 2014 news; May 2016 news). What if scientists wanted to make a temporary change, by targeting RNA instead? In the October 25 Science, researchers led by Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of... -
As Hurricane Irma winds down — and a message from a Florida sheriff – saying that shooting guns at the storm would not turn it aside — brings to mind the question of why we can’t control hurricanes. The short answer is that we can’t control weather at any... -
A South African child born with HIV has surprised experts by appearing to be effectively cured of the AIDS virus after just a year of treatment, followed by 8½ years drug free. Patients with HIV would normally need to stay on antiretroviral (ART) drugs for the rest of their...
