Researchers have long thought that life forms came into existence, and started using Earth's nitrogen, around 2 billion years ago. But new research from the University of Washington reveals that something was converting nitrogen way earlier than that—about 3.2 billion years ago. At that time, Earth would have been a mere 1.3 billion years old. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, completely overturns the idea that our ancient biosphere was inhospitable to living beings.

In a new study, computer scientists wrote algorithms for robots to arrange blocks into designs that a human would recognize as a car, a turtle, a house, and other things. But the designs weren't programmed in. Instead, the robots learned from in-person (in-robot?) demonstrations... plus asking questions on a crowd-sourcing website called Mechanical Turk.

Hello, mind control! Researchers at the University of Washington say they've created the first non-invasive brain interface between two humans - i.e., they've basically achieved telepathy.

Imagine the Kinect. Now imagine you can use gestures like you'd use with the Kinect to control anything - appliances, lights, gadgets, whatever. Now imagine you can do all of that from a different room entirely.

A research team in Washington state is on its way to making a fusion rocket that could carry people to Mars in 30 days, NBC News reported.

Sometimes, scientists need a hand. There's a lot of data to sift through, and now more than ever, the public can be part of that sifting. Take this fun new project: a crowdsourced hunt for star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy.