The world’s expanding population will need more protein, but that same bunch of new people will be competing for land and water with the livestock from which humanity gets most of its protein now—as well as with protein-rich crops such as beans and soy. A solution: a crop that grows in brackish water, thrives in...
A “super-intelligent” artificial intelligence (AI) very likely would become so capable that humans would no longer be able to direct or contain its behavior, several researchers have warned in a study published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. Odds are that such an AI eventually will be created, the group said. To control it, scientists......
Oncologists regularly zap cancer tumors using versions of “ablation” therapy, which inserts probes into a tumor to either freeze it to death or to use radio waves or ultrasound to burn it up. Those treatments avoid full-scale surgery and minimize pain and recovery time. However, they can damage surrounding tissues and blood vessels and may...
In December 2020, China’s lunar probe Chang’E-5 returned soil samples from the moon to Earth that contained the first clear evidence that the moon has traces of water. That raises hopes that a lunar settlement might be able to extract drinking water from the local landscape that also could serve as a source of hydrogen...
Almost 35 million people in the U.S.—more than one person in every 10—and more than 500 million worldwide, live with diabetes, the body’s inability to properly process sugar in the blood. As diabetes has become epidemic in the developed world, most of us have learned that people with the condition must take daily injections of...
The number of devices competing to produce sustainable fusion energy has grown again with the introduction of the “stellarator” by Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. For decades, scientists have labored to create chambers in which heat as high as 100 million°F combines with crushing pressures to melt hydrogen atoms together, releasing vast quantities...
Where chemists have failed, nature has come to our rescue. Humans have overused antibiotics for decades, creating more and more dangerous bacteria that are immune to our drugs. Now researchers at Portsmouth University in England and Naresuan and Pibulsongkram Rajabhat universities in Thailand have found that hydroquinine, a compound in the bark of the cinchona...
Using three kinds of mouse stem cells, biologists at the University of Cambridge have created living embryos with beating hearts, all parts of a developing brain, and the beginnings of all other organs in a mouse’s body. Two kinds of the stem cells support an embryo’s growth and development; the other kind becomes the various...
Computers can crunch numbers indefinitely but after a few hours of steady brainwork, humans become logy, lose focus, and are given to impulsive behavior that brings quick rewards, like taking a break to play a video game or just zoning out. Why does this happen? Scientists have long told us that it’s similar to muscle...
Vehicles are a key source of carbon dioxide’s increasing density in the atmosphere. Now two projects are enlisting those same vehicles to take the waste gas back out of the air. At the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology, students have 3D-printed a plastic, all-electric car designed to capture more CO2 over its life cycle than...
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