Science

It’s possible to spot many of the manmade objects orbiting Earth from the ground, but not usually with the unaided eye. That could change in the coming days, as a team of Russian engineers and students from the Moscow State Mechanical Engineering University (MAMI) deploy the Mayak satellite. The satellite …

A literature review of 37 studies has found that regular consumption of artificial sweeteners is associated with long-term weight gain and an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. The review paper is published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Consumption of nonnutritive sweeteners is associated …

On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flight through the Pluto system. On the two-year anniversary of the flyby, the New Horizons team is unveiling a set of flyover movies and detailed global maps of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. A global map of the …

A team of paleontologists from the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum, the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum has added another species of bird-like feathered dinosaur to the prehistoric catalog, and this one was found in Canada. Albertavenator curriei. Image credit: Oliver Demuth. Albertavenator curriei, as the paleontologists …

For the last few years, we’ve been able to frame NASA’s research and exploration with the goal of reaching Mars. The agency has been saying it wanted to land a human on the red planet in the 2030s, but now that’s looking less likely. William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for …

The health care debate continues to rage in Senate, the media, and in the public discourse. Call it Obamacare, Trumpcare, AHCA, ACA, Better Care Reconciliation Act – the current law, and the current proposals in Congress to change it – all claim to provide affordable access to health care for Americans. …

Ancient, independent inactivations of the ucp1 gene, which encodes the uncoupling protein 1, or UCP1 (essential for thermogenesis in brown fat), were a major force driving the evolution of nearly half of all placental mammal orders, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances (biorXiv.org preprint). Gaudry et …

A group of researchers at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research has identified a protein called Blimp-1 as a likely primary cause of the adverse reaction of the immune system in lupus patients. Common signs and symptoms of systemic lupus erythematosus, the most common type of lupus. Image credit: Mikael …

Water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals called tardigrades will survive the risk of extinction from all astrophysical catastrophes, and be around for at least 10 billion years — far longer than the human race, according to new research from the Universities of Oxford and Harvard. This scanning electron microscope image shows a …

A team of computer scientists and electrical engineers at the University of Washington has invented a cellphone that requires no batteries and harvests power from either ambient radio signals or light. The device is described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, …