As you read this, NASA's New Horizons is heading to Pluto. After the marathon probe zooms past Pluto in July of next year, it will travel across the Kuiper Belt, that vast rim of primitive ice…

The United States of America has the best medical treatment in the world, but like most things with quality it is not cheap. Advocacy groups like the Commonwealth Fund focus on high average cost in…

Cave beetles are one of the most iconic species found in subterranean habitats. They were historically the first living organisms described by science that are adapted to the conditions of hypogean…

Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a class of walking "bio-bots" powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical pulses, giving researchers…

The H1N1 2009 pandemic influenza virus, known informally as 'swine flu', has remained a hot topic in science and culture. The science and medical community, including former FDA deputy…

Generally, people on the autism spectrum tend to be personally cautious and socially withdrawn. As you would expect, previous research shows that people with autism tend to have low rates of…

Can addiction be predicted? That's always been the goal and conjecture has focused on everything from family to environment. But there are just as many fails as wins. A child who grew up in a house…

We all know how fire works, the same way we know how gravity works. But, like gravity, there is a lot we don't know about combustion.  There are many reasons to delve into its secrets. For…

Stanford researchers envision a crystal that can form a monolayer three atoms thick. Their computer simulations show that this crystal, molybdenum ditelluride, can act like a switch: its crystal…

We all have some idea how solar panels work by now; a photovoltaic cell gets bombarded by photons from the sun, which knocks loose electrons that flow as electricity, hopefully while wasting as…