The spade-toothed beaked whale is one of the world’s rarest species. So rare in fact that no one had even seen one at all until 2010, when a mother and calf washed ashore in New Zealand dead. The spotting was so rare that the whales were misidentified as the more common Gray’s beaked whales — [...]
DNA hacking is now street legal in Europe for lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD), a disease that leads to pancreatitis. The treatment, called Glybera, will be released by Dutch firm uniQure in the second half of 2013. Glybera will be administered to patients by specially trained doctors at a limited number of European hospitals. Patients receiving treatment have [...]
I was at an event last night where the CEO of WiTricity demonstrated wireless electricity, a technology invented at MIT. It was astounding, mind-blowing, and you could feel — pardon the pun — the electric excitement flow throughout the room at the site of powering electrical devices wirelessly. Anyway, Boston Magazine examines the change underway [...]
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can [...]
“Seven prominent Italian earthquake experts were convicted of manslaughter on Monday and sentenced to six years in prison for failing to give adequate warning to the residents of a seismically active area in the months preceding an earthquake [in 2009] that killed more than 300 people.”
Human papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S. and one of the leading causes of cervical cancer. There’s a vaccine for boys and girls that can be administered around the age of 12 to prevent both. For whatever reason, critics of the vaccine contend that it will lead young men and [...]
The answer is “yes”, probably, on biking up a mountain if you could already get 80% of the way to the top; but “no” if you think you could be competitive in the Tour de France, says PopSci’s Colin Lecher. Turns out, doing all the performance enhancers that Armstrong has “allegedly” done (I’m eating some [...]
Because the half-life of DNA is 521 years, or so claims a group of scientists from Denmark and Australia after studying the leg bones of the extinct moa bird. Unless of course you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and humans and dinosaurs co-mingled, then, sweet! Life will totally find a way.
On one side of the debate is Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard, who claims that hominids became people, like you or I, by mastering fire and learning to cook food over it some 1.8 million years ago. Other anthropologists and archaeologists believe humans learned to control fire only 12,000 years ago. That’s a pretty [...]
