Brain cells are not something you want to find growing where you don’t expect them. But that’s the surprise that awaited a team from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) when it analyzed the mini kidneys researchers have been growing from stem cells in the lab. Thankfully, the WUSTL team also found a way to prevent most of the brain cells from turning up in lab-grown mini kidneys — and the technique could prevent rogue cells from developing in other mini organs, too.

In the next 5 to 10 years, a new generation of small networked sensors will provide doctors with up-to-the-moment insight into patients’ health. Here's a few of the things underway.

The most common risk factor for serious disease is old age. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurological conditions, diabetes — all increase radically with advancing years. And the older a person is, the more likely he or she is to have multiple chronic illnesses. Some scientists hope one day to treat all of them at once — by targeting aging itself.

Wombats are the only animals in the world that produce cube-shaped scat. But how and why do they do it? Scientists now have a better idea.

Scientists think there's a 'dark matter hurricane' coming, but it's definitely not going to kill you. It's actually kind of exciting.

A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the use of vegetable oil in biofuels, leading to industrial-scale deforestation — and a huge spike in carbon emissions.

The C-section rate has almost doubled in less than a generation.

Accounting for meltwater from the Antarctic Ice Sheet in simulations of global climate leads to substantial changes in future climate projections and identifies a potential feedback mechanism that exacerbates melting.

Neandertals are shaking off their notoriety for being head bangers. Our nearby transformative cousins experienced a lot of head wounds, yet no more so than late Stone Age people, an investigation proposes. Rates of cracks and other bone harm in a huge example of Neandertal and old Homo sapiens skulls generally coordinate rates recently revealed for human foragers and agriculturists who have lived inside the previous 10,000 years, closes a group driven by paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Chicxulub Puerto, Mexico, is the centre of the impact crater that scientists believe was made when the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs smashed into the Earth’s surface.

Eva Feldman's research shows Implanting neural stem cells in the brains of mouse models improved recognition and spatial memory, along with learning

Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that’s so different from other living things that it doesn’t fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom used to classify known organisms.

The nests of Florida ants called Formica archboldi are adorned with the carcasses of their enemies — namely, the heads of other species known as trap-jaw ants. How Formica archboldi acquire these gruesome home accessories has perplexed scientists since the 1950s. But now, thanks to high-speed and time lapse videos, we have a better picture of this bizarre behavior.

Regardless of the various toppings and sauces you can get with your incredible pie, you truly haven't lived until you've had a pizza adorned with five different toppings. Four's fine, I suppose, but five's fantastic. Parmesan, cheddar, mozzarella and gorgonzola, but instead of a tomato sauce, the base was adorned with brie.

Miniature lab-grown kidneys have been hiding something from the scientists who grew them. Instead of developing into different varieties of kidney cells, some of the cells took a different path and became brain and muscle cells. These simple mini kidneys — also known as kidney organoids — are grown from stem cells that are encouraged to develop into clusters of specific kidney cells. But it turns out that the "recipes" that encourage the development of specialized kidney cells were also cranking out cells from other organs, according to a new study.

Have you ever wondered why every planet we know about is shaped like a sphere? Why not a cube, or an hourglass? While those—and let's be honest, most other shapes—would definitely break the laws of physics, there's one odd planet form that wouldn't: a donut.

How did life begin? Two common answers come to mind. One is that, at some point, a deity decided to suspend the laws of physics and will a slew of slimy creatures into being. A second is that a one-in-a-trillion collision of just the right atoms billions of years ago happened to produce a molecular blob with the unprecedented capacity to reproduce itself.

Scientists this week released a conceptual design report for a next-generation particle accelerator in China, which would serve as a “Higgs boson factory,” as its proponents have called it.

Scientists at Dalhousie Universityhave discovered a new branch on the ‘Tree of Life’ that no one knew existed. Their findings were published today in the journal Nature and will be critical to better understanding the evolutionary history of life on earth. “This discovery literally redraws our branch of the ‘Tree of Life’ at one of its deepest points,” explains Alastair Simpson, the lead author of the study and biology professor at Dalhousie. “It opens a new door to understanding the evolution of complex cells—and their ancient origins—back well before animals and plants emerged on Earth.”

Representative John Culberson, an 8-term Texas Republican and staunch supporter of NASA and planetary exploration, lost his re-election bid to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher last week. Many factors played into this outcome, but one bears consideration by space advocates: his support for the scientific search for life at Europa was seen as a weakness and attacked accordingly.

How in the world could you possibly look inside a star? You could break out the scalpels and other tools of the surgical trade, but good luck getting within a few million kilometers of the surface before your skin melts off. The stars of our universe hide their secrets very well, but astronomers can outmatch their cleverness and have found ways to peer into their hearts using, of all things, sound waves.

Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient’s body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients’ own cells.

Is it time to put the stereotype of the violent and brutish Neanderthal to rest? New research paints a different picture of the ancient hominin — one that looks similar to Homo sapiens. Researchers previously thought that Neanderthal lives were far more nasty, brutish and short than ancient H. sapiens, based mainly on studies looking at levels of injury among both groups. Now, however, in a much more comprehensive look, a team of University of Tübingen (UIT) researchers found that both Neanderthals and H. sapiens living in the Ice Age sustained similar levels of head trauma.

Put on your friendliest face and say hello to the newest member of our planetary neighborhood: Barnard’s star b. An international team led by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science announced today that they’ve detected an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to Earth at just six light-years away. The astronomers calculate the newfound world, dubbed Barnard’s star b, to be about 3.2 times the mass of Earth and to orbit its host star once every 233 days.

Nearly every measurement of weight you’ve ever made, from peeking at your bathroom scale to measuring out flour for a recipe, can be traced back to just a single object: a metal kilogram made of platinum and iridium that resides under lock and key in an underground vault in Paris. It’s called the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, and since its creation in 1889 it has been the standard by which the world’s weights are defined. But not for much longer.

The number of sheep and cattle in the UK should be reduced by between a fifth and a half to help combat climate change, a report says. The shift is needed, the government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC) maintains, because beef and lamb produce most farm greenhouse gases. The report foresees an increase in the number of pigs and chickens because these produce less methane. The farm union NFU said it did not agree with reducing livestock numbers.

The idea of a balloon that floats high up above Earth indefinitely is a tantalizing one. Solar power would allow such stratospheric balloons to operate like low-cost satellites at the edge of space, where they could provide communication in remote or disaster-hit area, follow hurricanes, or monitor pollution at sea. One day, they could even take tourists on near-space trips to see the curvature of the planet.

There are various issues on which there is a scientific consensus but great public controversy, such as anthropogenic climate change and the safety of vaccines. One previously popular explanation for this mismatch was that an information deficit among the public is to blame. Give people all the facts and then, according to this perspective, the public will catch up with the scientists. Yet time and again, that simply hasn’t happened.

Plants are boring. They just sit there photosynthesizing while animals have all the fun. Right? Not so much. Take a look at the interactions between ants and plants—plants have evolved features specifically to make them enticing to ants, like juicy nectar for the insects to eat and hollow thorns for them to take shelter in. In exchange, plants use ants to spread their seeds and even act as bodyguards.

Most of Earth’s surface has been plotted, mapped and measured. And along the way, scientists have turned up a plethora of craters big and small. But there was always one major crater missingMost of Earth’s surface has been plotted, mapped and measured. And along the way, scientists have turned up a plethora of craters big and small. But there was always one major crater missing.

Long before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a Japanese video game developer predicted society's issues of truth and reality. Over a decade before my posts on post-truth aphorisms and our struggles in constructing narratives, Hideo Kojima would create a game in which the archenemy was none other than the American government itself in 2001.

Climate change is altering America’s first national park so quickly that plants and animals may not be able to adapt.

Trove of DNA from prehistoric inhabitants reveals that the continents’ early settlers moved far and fast.

Thanks to genetically engineered pigs, the donor-organ shortage could soon be a thing of the past.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Scientists and journalists alike were reminded of that oft-quoted phrase by famed cosmologist Carl Sagan when authors of a study published in Nature admitted this week that they needed to issue a correction. The study was widely covered by outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC and Scientific American. While the correction, which has yet to appear, may provide fodder for climate change skeptics, many in the scientific community are praising the authors...