Last week, prominent tech site Gigaom ceased operations with the terse note “Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time”. Started in 2006 by Om Malik, the site had…

Two things that have caught my attention recently. The first concerns trapping solar energy.  One way to do this is to convert it directly into electricity with a solar panel, but one with much…

A new app for finding and mapping chromosomal loci uses multicolored versions of CRISPR/Cas9. The labeling system, developed by  the University of Massachusetts Medical School, could be a key to…

A new system called BASIC could give synthetic biology a boost by creating artificial DNA that is faster, more accurate and more flexible than existing methods.  To engineer new organisms,…

Apple has found a new use for their iPhone - medicine. People had already created lots of apps, of course, but ResearchKit, due out next month, is the first Apple framework to make it easier. …

Amid all the dire warnings that machines run by artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take over from humans we need to think more about how we program them in the first place. The technology may…

A new test that uses combinations of cells from a single donor’s blood can predict whether a new drug will cause a severe immune reaction in humans. The test could avert disasters like the 2006 trial…

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk a mile (or 1.6 kilometers) in somebody else’s shoes? Or have you ever tried to send a telepathic message to a partner in transit to “pick up…

Drug testing is most commonly performed using urine samples and its accuracy has made it the gold standard, but collecting samples is inconvenient so a group of researchers from the Department of…

In recent years, hundreds of new synthetic recreational drugs have emerged – drugs that neither the general public nor the scientific community know very much about. Many of these new synthetic…