Researchers may have figured out how the 100 or so stars around the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole could have formed. Stars emerge when clouds of hydrogen molecules coalesce under their collective gravitational attraction.
A lensless microscope the size of a dime might quickly and cheaply scan blood for tumor cells and parasites. In the device created by Changhuei Yang and his team at the California Institute of Technology, light shines on a liquid sample flowing through a narrow channel, below which are one-micron-wide apertures spaced 10 microns apart.
Biologist Ian Wilmut of University of Edinburgh had termed the process of using human embryos for isolation of stem ells as unethical. Soon after this announcement his further researches concluded that adult skin cells can be genetically reprogrammed to behave like stem cells and proliferate continuously like the embryonic cells and hence avoid the usage of human embryos. These reverse-engineered human stem cells may leapfrog the embryonic kind and can be applied to teat various human fatal diseases.
By late May, President George W. Bush was expected to have signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which will prohibit health insurers from canceling or denying coverage or hiking premiums based on a genetic predisposition to a specific disease.
A new stretchy material can be cut and rejoined at the same spot just by pressing the broken ends together for a few minutes. The self-healing rubber stays stretchy even after being severed five or six times or cut and left alone overnight, French researchers say.
Besides the first seafood dinner, signs of the earliest symbolic thought A cave on the southern coast of South Africa contains a bowl's worth of edible shellfish dating back to about 165,000 years ago. Besides pushing back the earliest known seafood meal by 40,000 years, the discovery also marks the earliest time when people might have engaged in symbolic thought.
Three years ago archaeologists found a skull on the Indonesian island of Flores that belonged to a hominin so small that it earned the nickname “Hobbit.” A furious debate ensued: the fossil discoverers classify the meter-tall hominin as part of a separate species that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago; others maintain it was a modern human who had microcephaly, in which the brain fails to reach normal size.
The human ancestral family tree just got a lot bushier: a newly discovered fossil supports the notion that Homo habilis may not have evolved into the larger Homo erectus. Researchers have found an H. habilis
Astronomers have detected an exoplanet that most likely survived the red giant phase of its parent star. V391 Pegasi belongs to a class of subdwarf stars that vary in brightness every few minutes.
Mere months after making a technologically feasible proposal, researchers have demonstrated a rudimentary example of an invisibility cloak. The device consists of a composite of metal and wires embedded in fiberglass and structured so as to make light behave in weird ways.
The quantum link called entanglement keeps getting longer—in the latest demonstration, the distance spanned two of Spain's Canary Islands. When two photons are entangled, what happens to one instantaneously determines the fate of the other, no matter how far apart they are.
