Wireless connections that are 20 times faster? What could be disappointing about that?

If you're asking yourself "how does Mastodon work?" this post will help. By Kev Quirk.

Long-overlooked “tunneling nanotubes” and other bridges between cells act as conduits for sharing RNA, proteins or even whole organelles. By Viviane Callier.

A 500-year-old oak tree outside the town of Eutin, Germany, has been matching singles for more than a century and is reportedly responsible for 100-plus marriages.

Hostile acts against submerged Internet cables would put critical communications, trillions of dollars in transactions and the world economy at risk. By Doug Tsuruoka. (Jan. 6, 2018)

Researchers found that the brain began to prepare the motor areas to respond very early, during initial stimulus presentation, suggesting that we get ready to respond even before we know what the response will be. This might explain why people sometimes say things before they think.

A sociolinguist wonders if they’ll ever be able to interpret the waves, high beams and middle fingers of human drivers.

Bacterial biofilms and slime molds are more than crude patches of goo. Detailed time-lapse microscopy reveals how they sense and explore their surroundings, communicate with their neighbors and adaptively reshape themselves. By John Rennie.

By draining the fluids from several hosts, dodder vines inadvertently allow plants to communicate with each other and share alarm signals. By Ed Yong.

It has long been held that plants are essentially non-responsive organisms, but new studies suggest that there may be more to plants than meets the eye. By Micah Hanks.

Hacking as it relates to cyber warfare and espionage is as hot a topic as it’s ever been, and everyone from the government to major tech firms like Apple and Google are working on locking down communications so as to make them as hack-proof as possible. Now, it seems China is taking the lead, and the country just used a quantum satellite launched last year to send what researches suggest is an unhackable communication, made possible by a branch of physics once pioneered by Albert Einstein.

Chinese scientists have pulled off a major feat with one of the sub-atomic world's weirdest phenomena: photons that behave like twins and experience the same things simultaneously, even over great distances.

Patients with no control over their body answer questions as a computer interprets brain signals. By James Gallagher.

Eight ways labs benefit from the popular workplace messaging tool. By Jeffrey M. Perkel. (Dec. 29, 2016)

NASA’s NavCube project could power an X-ray communication demonstration in space. By Charles Q. Choi.

The president of METI International weighs in on the science and fiction of ‘Arrival.’ By Daniel Oberhaus.

After training on whack-a-mole and Pong, a woman paralysed by ALS has become the first person to use a brain implant at home, communicating by thought alone. By Jessica Hamzelou.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s tenure at the agency is coming to an end. By Sam Gustin.

The Micius satellite will encrypt data using fundamental laws of physics rather than crackable codes. By Robert Young.