Tag: Science

With people in advanced nations becoming more and more sedentary, fitness experts are trying to get more of us back on our feet.

Maybe you’re taking medication that requires you to visit a medical lab every so often to give blood or other body fluids to have various aspects of your biochemistry checked.

Bioscientists at Duke University’s MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences were delving into the mysteries of Cdx2, a gene crucial to fetal development, including of the spinal column.

Plastic’s drawbacks are well-documented: it’s made from crude oil, it’s troublesome to recycle, the rising tide of waste clogs our landfills, littering our waterways and endangering wildlife, and its microparticles make their way into our food, our bodies, and our brains.

At the University of Auckland in New Zealand, rats paralyzed by spinal cord injuries are walking again, thanks to a tiny control box they wear like a backpack.

Flesh-eating maggots are chewing their way across Mexico and southern Texas. To fight them, the U.S. government is preparing to breed billions of flies and scatter them from airplanes across the affected landscape.

By turning on a gene that evolution had turned off, researchers at the University of Beijing have enabled mice to regrow missing ear tissue.

Biologists at the University of Edinburgh have figured out how to reprogram the genome of e. coli, a common bacterium, so it eats waste PET plastic—the material commonly used in plastic bottles and packaging—and yields acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol, the painkiller in popular brands such as Excedrin, Panadol, and Tylenol.