In November, NASA tapped nine private spaceflight companies who will be allowed to bid on upcoming projects. Yesterday, they elaborated on what those projects would be during an industry forum. Starting as early as this year, NASA hopes to send commercial landers to the lunar surface as the first step toward returning to the moon, this time for good.

Traditional cell biology textbooks say that most cells can only differentiate to the same cell type, with the same function. It seems that some of these textbooks need to be rewritten, thanks to the new results by researchers at the University of Bergen and their international partners at Université de Genève (UNIGE), Harvard Medical School, Universiteit Leiden and the Oregon Stem Cell Center (OHSU).

An earlier report claimed that Apple have had three big problems developing AirPower after announcing it with great fanfare more than a year ago. First, it overheated while charging devices. Then, it suffered from "buggy inter-device communication, as well as charging activation and issues with charging speed, and overall accuracy of charge levels." And finally, charging multiple devices on the same mat was “extremely difficult” because of charging signals interference.

We’ve published something like a bazillion Tesla sales charts and stats. (See “30 Nasty Charts,” for example.) But this is actually a new one. Jose Pontes of EV Volumes and CleanTechnica has his 2018 tally wrapped up and it puts the Tesla Model 3 in the #1 position globally among all plug-in vehicles. In fact, the Model 3 was approximately 55,000 sales above the #2 BAIC EC-Series, an extremely popular Chinese model. The Model 3 gobbled 7% of the plug-in vehicle market, while the #2 EC-Seri...

“Millions of middle-class Americans are just one missed paycheck away from poverty,” reports Aimee Picchi for CBS News. Picchi adds that four in ten are considered “liquid-asset poor,” which is defined as lacking “enough savings to make ends meet at the poverty level for three months.” For a family of four to live at a poverty-line income for three months would cost $6,275. Again, four in ten households have cash savings that fall below this amount.

AT&T's misleading "5G E" network indicator for 4G phones, which was rolled out to some Android smartphones last month, has now come to iPhones in a beta version of iOS 12.2. AT&T customers who installed the second beta of iOS 12.2 "are noticing their iPhones displaying a '5G E' connection to AT&T's network," MacRumors reported yesterday. 9to5Mac and other news sites provided details on the change, and people on Twitter posted screenshots of the...

Scientists have claimed that the mysterious object is the first discovery of its kind and may be the missing link in the evolution of the early solar system. The large body, uncovered by a Japanese team of researchers, may help us learn how the solar system evolved. It is defined as a critical intermediate step in understanding how little ash clouds and ice have become the planets we know today.

A wide-ranging ban on microplastics covering about 90% of pollutants has been proposed by the EU in an attempt to cut 400,000 tonnes of plastic pollution in 20 years. Every year, Europe releases a bulk amount of microplastics six times bigger than the “Great Pacific garbage patch” into the environment – the equivalent of 10bn plastic bottles. The phasing out proposed by the European Chemicals Agency (Echa) would remove 36,000 tonnes a year of “intentionally added” microplastic fibres a...

A new report says food companies are pursuing profit at the expense of public and environmental health. That has to change. Obesity, climate change, and malnutrition are among the greatest global crises facing our world today. Wouldn’t it be great if there were solutions to tackle all three problems at once? That might sound far-fetched. But a new report, published Sunday in the Lancet, implores us to think about the possibility of big, systemic fixes for these interrelated scourges.

America’s president knows a catchy number when he sees one. Like much of the world’s media, Donald Trump tweeted this week that China’s growth in 2018 was its slowest in nearly three decades. This, he said, ought to compel it to make a “Real Deal” on trade with America. China’s growth of 6.6% last year was indeed the weakest since 1990, and the country does want to end the trade war. But a closer look at the data shows why its leaders are less panicked than Mr Trump might think.

In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a website calling itself “WTO5 News” posted the headline “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president.” Pope Francis never made such an endorsement, but that didn’t stop the story from being shared, liked, or commented on nearly 1 million times on social media. Another site, the “Denver Guardian,” posted a story titled “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder suicide” the d...

A collision between Earth and another planet that helped form the moon may have also delivered key components for creating life, a study suggests. Rice University researchers believe the Earth collided with another planet roughly the size of Mars more than 4.4 billion years ago. The collision not only helped form our moon, but the planet smashing into Earth left elements such as carbon and nitrogen, called volatiles, required to form new life.

Built to resemble the Renault RS17 Formula 1 car, this LEGO model is a chip off the old block We've already covered what is possibly the most amazing Formula 1 auction of the modern era in Paris next month. It'll feature items from Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and Jules Bianchi. 

The pay people take home after accounting for inflation fell 1.3 percent last year, a new analysis shows. The findings come a year after President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with his administration promising it would deliver "immediate" wage growth to workers. Yet many workers' wages aren't keeping pace with the cost of living, compensation-data company PayScale found. That's concerning because it indicates more Americans are falling behind -- despite...

In a win for freedom of the press, a federal court this month struck down an Iowa law making it a crime to lie about your intentions when accessing an agricultural production facility. The “ag-gag” law, which was aimed at undercover journalists and activists, essentially prevented undercover investigations of the agricultural industry. In a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Iowa, the court rightly found that the law violates the First Amendment.

The latest NPD video game hardware sales in the United States have started to trickle in for December 2018. Obviously it was an extremely busy month for the three console manufacturers during the Christmas period and it was the Nintendo Switch which came in first. The Nintendo Switch was followed by the Xbox One console and then Sony’s PlayStation 4.

Using historical data to train risk assessment tools could mean that machines are copying the mistakes of the past.