Science

Lost your keys? Can’t remember where you parked the car? If only you had the memory of a mountain chickadee. These half-ounce birds, with brains slightly larger than a pea, stash tens of thousands of food items like seeds in tree bark, under dead leaves, and inside pinecones across the mountains…

A new way to safely boost immune cells to fight cancer—avoiding harmful side-effects such as hair loss—has been developed. Scientists at Virginia Tech devised the ground-breaking immunotherapy to localize cancer-killing cytokines in tumors, improving the effectiveness of current treatments. Immunotherapy involves harnessing the power of the body’s immune system to fight…

University of Queensland scientists had a remarkable eureka moment when they accidentally turned the most common greenhouse gas into electricity. By using positive and negative ions of different sizes, the team created electricity from CO2, and now believes that their ‘nanogenerators’ could help improve the reputation of the simple molecule. Now…

Cannabis and its derivatives have already been shown to relieve short-term chronic pain, reduce inflammation 30x more robustly than aspirin, improve symptoms of Crohn’s disease, and show some efficacy in killing lung and pancreatic cancer cells, but a recent epidemiological look at cannabis use has linked it to dramatically lower rates…

Appalachian mining country seems an unlikely place to find a potential breakthrough in renewable energy, but samples of mine tailings in West Virginia have turned up plenty of lithium contained inside fool’s gold. The team of scientists behind the discovery described it as “previously unheard of” and they hope that lithium…

In an interview with the Brisbane Times, an Australian ophthalmologist and biotech entrepreneur lays out his vision for a world in which curing blindness in millions of people worldwide is easy and can be done with a bit of cell replication and a 3D printer. Professor Gerard Sutton is co-founder of…

In a world first, marine biologists were able to have a discourse with a humpback whale, pushing out the boundaries of cooperation and understanding that could be possible between our two species. An adult female humpback whale, known as Twain, in Southeast Alaska, was located along with a group of whales…