Science

Most people know only that Pluto is a planet that wasn’t a planet that is extremely cold and far away, but it has a softer side as well. Researchers believe the huge heart-shaped feature on the planetesimal’s surface was likely caused by a “giant and slow oblique-angle impact”. A team of…

Last November, one of NASA’s most famous craft, Voyager 1, stopped transmitting messages to the great anxiety of those responsible for receiving them. It wasn’t all stress though, because mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. Now however, the most distant object from…

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…