A mucus-wicking robotic pill may offer a new way to deliver meds. The multivitamin-sized device houses a motor and a cargo hold for drugs, including ones that are typically given via injections or intravenously, such as insulin and some antibiotics. If people could take such drugs orally, they could potentially avoid daily shots or a ... Read more
Great scientists become immortalized in various ways. Some through names for obscure units of measurement (à la Hertz, Faraday and Curie). Others in elements on the periodic table (Mendeleev, Seaborg, Bohr, among many others). A few become household names symbolizing genius — like Newton in centuries past and nowadays, Einstein. But only one has been ... Read more
Brenda Garstone is on the hunt for her heritage. Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are engraved with Aboriginal designs. These tree carvings — called dendroglyphs — could be hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet have received almost no ... Read more
A recent TV ad features three guys lost in the woods, debating whether they should’ve taken a turn at a pond, which one guy argues is a marsh. “Let’s not pretend you know what a marsh is,” the other snaps. “Could be a bog,” offers the third. It’s an exchange that probably wouldn’t surprise novelist ... Read more
My, what small teeth they had. A newfound treasure trove of ancient fish fossils unearthed in southern China is opening a window into the earliest history of jawed vertebrates — a group that encompasses 99 percent of all living vertebrates on Earth, including humans. The fossil site, dated from 439 million to 436 million years ... Read more
Scientists have teamed up with tiger sharks to uncover the largest expanse of seagrasses on Earth. A massive survey of the Bahamas Banks — a cluster of underwater plateaus surrounding the Bahama archipelago — reveals 92,000 square kilometers of seagrasses, marine biologist Oliver Shipley and colleagues report November 1 in Nature Communications. That area is ... Read more
Fifty years ago, three NASA astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, concluding the final Apollo mission. Less than a dozen years after President John F. Kennedy challenged the United States to commit itself to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely back to the Earth,” that historic program had achieved its ... Read more
SAN DIEGO — Scientists have devised ways to “read” words directly from brains. Brain implants can translate internal speech into external signals, permitting communication from people with paralysis or other diseases that steal their ability to talk or type. New results from two studies, presented November 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for ... Read more
Daylight saving time has ended, and most Americans have turned their clocks back an hour. My sixth-grader is in heaven. At 6:50 a.m. these days, our once testy tween zombie is now … moderately awake and relatively lucid. Instead of rising to gauzy predawn light, she’s got glowy morning sunshine beaming around her curtains. When ... Read more
You don’t need a dandelion to know which way the wind blows. But it can help. On any given dandelion, some seeds are destined to go north, while others are fated to fly east, south or west, and every direction in between. In effect, each dandelion seed is programmed to release for a wind coming ... Read more