Radical New DNA Microscope Reimagines the Cellular World. It's not every day that something from the 17th century gets radically reinvented. But this month, a team from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard took aim at one of the most iconic pieces of lab wa...

The LightSail-2 Mission Launched Last Week. It Could Shape the Future of Solar Spaceflight. Just like the early explorers harnessed the wind to sail around the world, scientists have long dreamed of using light to sail through the cosmos. Last week an ambitious trial of a technology called Li...

Can AI Save the Internet from Fake News? There's an old proverb that says "seeing is believing." But in the age of artificial intelligence, it's becoming increasingly difficult to take anything at face value--literally. The rise of so-called "...

The Biggest Offshore Wind Project in the US Is Underway. From the steady growth in market share of electric cars to continuous improvement and expansion of solar energy technology, it appears the world is going renewable--the age of fossil fuels is slowly but...

Scientists Can Now Clone Brain Organoids. Here's Why That Matters. An army of free-floating minibrain clones are heading your way! No, that's not the premise of a classic sci-fi brain-in-jars blockbuster. Rather, a team at Harvard has figured out a way to “clone” brai...

Making Algorithms More Like Kids: What Can Four-Year-Olds Do That AI Can't? Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one...

How Facebook's New 'Mirror World' Will Help Train AI. The dream of a robot butler seems tantalizingly close, but first we need to teach them how to navigate our cluttered human environments. That's why Facebook has created an ultra-realistic simulator to ...

How Deep Learning Is Transforming Brain Mapping. Thanks to deep learning, the tricky business of making brain atlases just got a lot easier. Brain maps are all the rage these days. From rainbow-colored dots that highlight neurons or gene expression a...

CRISPR in Russia: The World's Next Gene-Edited Babies May Not Be Far Away. When Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced he had edited the genomes of two babies last November, he sparked an international outcry. Many feared he had opened the floodgates to human genetic engineer...

Inching Towards Abundant Water: New Progress in Desalination Tech. In early 2018, Cape Town, South Africa came dangerously close to being the world's first major city to run out of water. People lined up for blocks to collect spring water. Stores sold out of receptacl...