Author: Ben Daviss

A telomere is a cluster of nucleotides – the building blocks of DNA – gathered at the end of a chromosome. They’ve been likened to the plastic tip on a shoelace. Scientists have found that telomeres shrink with age and that keeping telomeres long prolongs life. As a result, longevity devotees have been downing supplements,...

Want to ride the bus in Rome? Better bring along those old water and soda bottles. Putting 30 of the bottles into special vending machines at select bus stations gets you a ticket for a free bus ride. In Surabaya, a port city of more than three million people on the Indonesian island of Java,...

A retired British naval engineer claims to have solved a decades-old battery problem with an invention that quadruples the range of today’s best electric vehicles. Aluminum-air batteries have been on the drawing board for decades: a piece of aluminum is immersed in an electrolyte and generates current simply by having one end exposed to air....

There’s a silver lining for Baby Boomers who can’t afford to retire: giving up work seems to aggravate cognitive decline. A recent study in China confirmed similar findings in other countries. Almost a decade ago, China introduced a pension system for elders in its rural areas where multi-generational family care had collapsed as young adults...

The human microbiome – the ecosystem of bacteria that lives in your gut – has been shown to affect everything from asthma to depression to anxiety disorders.  Knowing those bugs’ state of health is becoming key to diagnosing and treating a range of illnesses. Currently, physicians do that by analyzing a poop sample. But that...

Two new compounds are showing promise not just in slowing physical aging but actually reversing it. The first is rapamycin, a substance discovered on Easter Island (a volcanic island in Polynesia) in a strain of strep bacteria. Rapamycin suppresses immune response and so is commonly given to people who receive organ transplants to quell rejection;...

In 2004, a utility company hired physicist James McCanney to analyze the future usefulness of renewable energy technologies. It was then he discovered that the increasingly popular, three-bladed wind turbine is designed all wrong. This discovery led him to create the WING Generator, a vastly more efficient wind turbine that won the Water Abundance X...

Researchers at Finland’s Aalto University and the country’s VTT Technical Research Centre have created a new entrant in the competition to replace petroleum-based polymers and plastics.   The team bonded wood fibers with the silk protein of spiders’ webs. The resulting material is tough like wood but still pliable enough to stretch like a spider...

Carbon is the new black gold: capital is rushing to back schemes promising to harvest carbon from the air. Dimensional Energy, a start-up populated with Cornell University faculty, is touting its method of combining sunlight and CO2 to make methanol. Carbicrete in Montreal has just landed funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada to build a...

The world’s banana trees are under assault by a fungal wilt. Now, in addition to saving a nice topping for cereal or addition to your fruit salad, researchers have an even stronger reason to rescue this staple crop: it can replace plastic. Banana Leaf Technology, an Indian start-up, is applying a proprietary technology to alter...