Moving exoskeletons from sci-fi into medical rehabilitation and therapy
Stroke patients need therapy to recover, but there are not enough human therapists to meet the need. Can robots help?
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Analysis and Comment
Underwater microscope provides new views of ocean-floor sea creatures in their natural setting
Could this new technology do for the microscopic marine world what the first telescopes did for the heavens above?
The Pokémon GO craze sees gamers hit the streets but it comes with a warning
Within days of its release the new Pokémon Go had got people pounding the streets trying to capture virtual creatures. But already there are concerns over the risks it poses to gamers.
Is anything ever ‘forgotten’ online?
How hard is it to find out what information has been removed from search engine results? What about identifying who asked for it to be removed?
Freaks, geeks, norms and mores: why people use the status quo as a moral compass
It's a common quirk of human psychology to make the mental leap that the way things are is the way things ought to be. New research into how we explain the world around us sheds light on the phenomenon.
Can next-generation bomb ‘sniffing’ technology outdo dogs on explosives detection?
New research is narrowing the gap, creating technology with the detecting capabilities of canines but without the downsides of relying on a biological system.
How video can help police – and the public
With citizens filming police, and police recording public encounters, the key to the truth is establishing a clear timeline of events.
Plate tectonics: new findings fill out the 50-year-old theory that explains Earth’s landmasses
Fifty years on from a groundbreaking paper, geophysicists have progressed from believing continents never moved to thinking that every movement may leave a lasting memory on our planet.
Playing a science-based video game? It might be all wrong
Many digital games claiming to simulate evolution are inaccurate. These errors can undermine the games' potential educational benefits.
NASA’s Juno arrives at Jupiter to lift cloudy veil
The perilous Juno mission could help reveal how Jupiter formed, whether it has a rocky core and even whether it influenced life on Earth.
How social media can distort and misinform when communicating science
Social media is a great way to spread science information, fast. But the online echo chamber isn't always good at separating what's valid from what's not, and being prolific doesn't make you right.
Bikini islanders still deal with fallout of US nuclear tests, 70 years later
In the summer of 1946, the U.S. government detonated the first of many atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. Seventy years of radiation exposure later, residents are still fighting for justice.
Early days of internet offer lessons for boosting 3D printing
Thorny technical questions remain for net neutrality
How do food manufacturers pick those dates on their product packaging – and what do they mean?
Bartering for science: using mobile apps to get research data
Does eating bamboo make it harder for pandas to reproduce?
Is Panama on the verge of a scientific brain drain?
How risky are the World Economic Forum’s top 10 emerging technologies for 2016?
Buying and selling hacked passwords: How does it work?
Bias
Where does anti-LGBT bias come from – and how does it translate into violence?
Aggression against sexual minorities is rooted in society-level stigmas that devalue LGBT individuals.
Many small microaggressions add up to something big
These innocuous-on-the-surface comments and actions take a psychological toll on marginalized groups. Here's why they're a part of campus debates on race.
Virtual bodyswapping reduces bias against other races
In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white American writer, underwent medical treatments to change his skin appearance and present himself as a black man. He then traveled through the segregated US south to…
Robots
Why robots need to be able to say ‘No’
How can we humans avoid harmful results of robot obedience?
Are robots taking our jobs?
In the past, technology both destroyed and created jobs. Is that trend ending?
We need a national conversation about sensible drone laws
A bill before Congress could pave the way for the opening of our backyards, neighborhoods, business properties and campuses to commercial drone traffic.
STEM jobs
STEM postdoc researchers are highly trained, but for what?
The STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics supposedly suffer from a shortage of graduates. But the job market is actually brutal.
Columnists
Research and Expert Database
Editors’ Picks
Is our Milky Way galaxy a zombie, already dead and we don’t know it?
Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they're figuring it out.
Three ways synthetic biology could annihilate Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases
Insecticides and mosquito nets only get you so far. Synthetic biologists are ready to take the battle against mosquito-borne disease to the level of DNA – which might spell the insects’ ultimate doom.
Machine learning and big data know it wasn’t you who just swiped your credit card
The end-of-year shopping whirlwind is underway. How does your credit card issuer watch out for fraudulent purchases on your account amid all those transactions?
How computers broke science – and what we can do to fix it
Virtually every researcher relies on computers to collect or analyze data. But when computers are opaque black boxes that manipulate data, it's impossible to replicate studies – a core value for science.
Many small microaggressions add up to something big
These innocuous-on-the-surface comments and actions take a psychological toll on marginalized groups. Here's why they're a part of campus debates on race.
Talking heads: what toilets and sewers tell us about ancient Roman sanitation
Archaeological and textual detective work is filling in some information about how ancient Romans used and thought about their sewers thousands of years ago.
Tracking American eels on the open sea to crack the mystery of their migration
Much of what we know about these elusive eels' life cycle has been based on circumstantial evidence. Now for the first time, scientists tracked an adult eel to its distant spawning ground.
In our Wi-Fi world, the internet still depends on undersea cables
Thin cables about as big around as a garden hose traverse the Earth's oceans carrying all our intercontinental internet data. No one's in charge and no one's defending them.
Ode to the fruit fly: tiny lab subject crucial to basic research
These insects are so much more than just the scourge of fruit bowls everywhere. They're a key model system for all kinds of research that teaches us about our own brain and body systems.
Fluorescent proteins light up science by making the invisible visible
First found in jellyfish, but now inserted into all kinds of organisms, GFPs illuminate biological structures and processes that researchers otherwise couldn't see.
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- How do food manufacturers pick those dates on their product packaging – and what do they mean?
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