I've long had my deep suspicions of the pharmaceutical industry, for reasons ranging from shady business practices to the abundance of dangerous prescription drugs that somehow make it to market to the highly suspicious pattern of SSRI's found in the bloodstreams of so many perpetrators of mass shootings. But sometimes you have to wonder just how ( Read more... )

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  To kick off this week's Science Friday, say hello to the world's newest mammal, the olinguito (oh-lihn-GEE'-toe) . Well, technically, it's not new, but it had somehow escaped notice by scientists, as it lives in the upper reaches of trees in South America and comes out only at night. The National Zoo in Washington had one for a year back in the ( Read more... )

So there's a lot of talk about Angelina Jolie getting a double mastectomy because of a genetic test that discovered she has an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer. Was this a courageous decision, as so many are portraying it? Perhaps ( Read more... )

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  Hey guys, I have an idea. Why don't we take a strain of the flu virus known for being highly lethal and combine it with a strain known for being highly contagious. It'll be fun! What could possibly go wrong?
  


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  Imagine a material that's paper-thin and can generate electricity by turning any surface that it coats into a type of solar panel. Then ( Read more... )

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  Research has shown that bees are apparently capable of what many humans aren't: deductive reasoning.
  


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  European researchers have been investigating the memories of people who've had near death experiences. They've found that such experiences are often more vivid and form stronger memories than real-life experiences. The research does not, however, ( Read more... )

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  Chemists at Oxford University have developed a new synthetic "tissue" by using a 3-D printer. The development could have future medical applications, as an entirely synthetic tissue does not have a genome and eliminates certain problems with replacement tissue made by other means, such as using stem cells.
  


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  So far, the Large Hadron Collider hasn't ( Read more... )

One of the key things that needs to happen before technology reaches what's been known in recent years as "the Singularity" is a far better understanding of the human brain that would allow us to essentially reverse engineer the root of human intelligence ( Read more... )

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  Medical researchers in the UK are working on a new synthetic vaccine that be made without using live virus. Such a vaccine, if proven successful, would be more stable and it could also be used more easily in developing countries that don't have refrigeration. It could potentially solve the problem of vaccines actually causing the disease they're ( Read more... )

Welcome to the sequester edition of Science Friday. We've heard a lot from government officials and interest groups about longer lines at airports, furloughs of government workers, military commissaries reducing their hours, closing of national parks, and cuts in unemployment benefits. What we haven't heard about is the impact on science: cuts to ( Read more... )

I think one of the best quotes I've heard recently was from Matt Novak, who wrote that thanks to the Jetsons, there's a cultural sense of betrayal that the future never really arrived. I don't think you can blame it all on the Jetsons, though. Science fiction promised people flying cars and weekend jaunts to the moon, but the reality is Twitter ( Read more... )