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Food futurists and industry leaders say these high-tech vertical farming operations are the future of agriculture. Indoor-grown produce is available in more than 20 supermarket chains nationwide. But despite massive investment, questions remain about efficiency and costs.
Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories.
Some varieties of wood, such as oak and maple, are renowned for their strength. But scientists say a simple and inexpensive new process can transform any type of wood into a material stronger than steel, and even some high-tech titanium alloys.
A new kind of ink for 3D printing liquifies when pressed through the nozzle of a 3D printer, but then quickly returns to its original shape, researchers report. The invention paves the way for personalized biomaterial implants, according to new research. As things stand, however, personalized implants remain a long way off.
Also known as “natural organic reduction,” composting burial is the brainchild of Katrina Spade, CEO of alternative burial company Recompose. The process involves decomposition of the corpse in soil—but not within a traditional cemetery.
Most of us think we know what aging looks and feels like. It announces itself with wrinkled skin and gray, thinning hair. But scientists are cataloging far subtler signs of biological aging, evident long before hair is lost and skin starts to crinkle.
As a teenager, Christopher Medina-Kirchner went to prison for selling ecstasy, but now his MDMA research is debunking the bad science that got him there. He’s also creating a pipeline to help other formerly incarcerated people transition into scientific research.
Native Hawaiians are protecting the mountain of Maunakea, at the heart of Hawaii’s Big Island, from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at its summit, where the facility would join venerable observatories like the twin Keck domes and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility.
The planet – known as Barnard b or GJ 699 b – is an exciting find given the planet is only six light-years away from Earth, making it one of closest worlds outside of our solar system.
A team of scientists at MIT is building devices meant to monitor people’s sleep and influence their dreams. One device, called Dormio, is an “interactive social robot” designed to detect when the user is falling asleep and affect their dreams with audio cues.
Only three people have ever reached the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. The deep is a world without sunlight, of freezing temperatures, and immense pressure. It’s remained largely unexplored until now. Cutting-edge technology is enabling a new generation of aquanauts to go deeper than ever before.
This is the pursuit of a much longer, healthier life span using science and genetics to achieve it. Who hasn’t dreamed of staying young but how far will you be prepared to go to achieve that dream? BBC’s Gabriela Torres meets the self-experimenters and scientists who are trying to dramatically extend our lives.
Humans generate far more actionable information than is encoded in all of our combined genetic material, and we carry much of it into the future. The data outside of our biological selves—call it the dataome—could actually represent the grander scaffolding for complex life.
Cape Canaveral contains one of the greatest concentrations of colonial shipwrecks in the world. The discovery of a legendary, lost shipwreck in North America has pitted treasure hunters and archaeologists against each other, raising questions about who should control sunken riches.
HB11 Energy is a spin-out company that originated at the University of New South Wales, and it announced today a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation. Fusion, of course, is the long-awaited clean, safe theoretical solution to humanity’s energy needs.
The stunning emergence of a new type of superconductivity with the mere twist of a carbon sheet has left physicists giddy, and its discoverer nearly overwhelmed.
A rogue band of researchers argues that what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above.
They made an improbable duo of UFO hunters— a plump Miss Marple and a gun-toting gamekeeper. The true story of their long-odds mission to solve the “Roswell of Wales” in Llandrillo, a small village built around a broad stream at the base of the Berwyn Mountains in North Wales.
In 2016, NASA used the Suomi NPP weather satellite to create a high resolution image of the earth at night. It can help us better understand the current developments and conflicts underway. The amount of light pollution is most severe in heavily populated areas, as well as in regions of high prosperity.
French scientists have discovered a mutant bacterial enzyme that can break down plastic for recycling within hours. The plastic-eating enzyme could offer an innovative recycling solution for millions of tonnes of toxic plastic waste material.
Electronics can be hazardous when disposed of improperly, and the Basel Action Network, or BAN, investigates the underground world of the e-waste trade. The nonprofit group secretly embeds trackers in discarded devices, then hands them to recyclers to see where they end up, exposing bad practices in the process.
For nearly 30 years, America’s four biggest rail companies—which move the majority of the country’s coal—have spent millions to deny climate science and block climate policy. They have joined or funded groups that attacked individual scientists and rejected reports from major scientific institutions.
Edward Makuka Nkoloso of Zambia had dreams to land Zambians on moon and mars beating the US and USSR in the Space race. He did everything he could with his limited resources to make his dream a reality but could he fulfill his dreams?
Evidence from Maya writing and art suggests Teotihuacan conquered Tikal outright, adding it to what some archaeologists see as a sweeping empire that may have included several Maya cities. Teotihuacan may have turned against Maya expatriates who had lived there peacefully for decades.
AI will tell you who to cast and predict how much money you’ll make. Despite skepticism about specific applications, the tide might be turning. A single factor has convinced Hollywood to stop dismissing big data: Netflix.
The length of time our “collective attention” is on any given event has grown shorter, and topics become popular and then drop out of public view at an accelerating rate. It’s no surprise if it feels harder and harder to dwell deeply on any topic.
Air conditioning systems can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
How’s it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be.
Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists — a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew.
Jachymov, a small uranium mining town in the northwest of the Czech Republic, has been key in the field of radioactivity research. More than a century ago, Marie and Pierre Curie based their revolutionary work on radioactivity on material brought from there.
Around 60 people in the world share a condition called “highly superior autobiographical memory”. They remember absolutely everything. The extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory.
Commercial airlines often prioritize boarding for passengers traveling with small children, or for those who need extra assistance, before starting to board the faster passengers. It’s counter-intuitive, but it turns out that letting slower passengers board first actually results in a more efficient process.
Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies.
Intelligence is not the same as critical thinking—and the difference matters. Most intelligence tests fail to capture real-world decision-making and our ability to interact well with others. This is why “smart” people do “dumb” things.
Having a basic, deep-seated fluency in math and science—not just an “understanding,” is critical. The “fluency” part of me that loved literature and language was also the same part of me that ultimately fell in love with math and science—and transformed and enriched my life.
Just off the coast of California, thousands of craterlike depressions, some as big as buses, dot the seafloor. These “micro depressions” are roughly 10 meters across and 1 meter deep—and nearly one-third of them contain garbage.
For science, profit, and pride, China, the U.S., and private companies are hunting for resources on the lunar surface. It’s not difficult to imagine moon development, like all development, proceeding less than peacefully, and less than equitably.
A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.
Serapium Forest is the most prosperous of Egypt’s 36 tracts of land that make up an ambitious program to combat desertification by creating sustainably managed commercial forests fed entirely by wastewater.
