In November 1974, President Richard Nixon signed the National Research Act into law. Some of the rules established by the law and its subsequent revisions seem so commonsense it's hard to imagine they needed to be codified into a bill. Don't knowingly deny subjects life-saving medication, for example. And don't experiment on people without their consent. But those rules did need to be formalized into the law.
In a US first, a team of biologists has edited a human embryo's DNA. The technique has been used before by scientists in China, but never in the United States, where the ethical debate over editing embryos rages on with no consensus in sight. And according to the U.S. team, their trial has achieved an unprecedented level of success.
From the earliest cannons to the last battleships, the fundamentals of a naval gun have remained roughly the same: hurtle a heavy projectile through the air using gunpowder. But railguns are a clean break from that method, as they use a powerful electrical pulse to drag a projectile at high speed down a long track before shooting it at a target far away.
You might be under the impression that plants photosynthesize—using energy from the sun to turn carbon dioxide and water into delicious and nutritious sugar—and you're mostly right. Even carnivorous plants like the Venus flytrap practice this process to some extent (though nutrient-poor environments and inefficiency often lead them to supplement their diets with something a little bloodier). But not all flora are capable of feeding off of the sun. Some long ago abandoned this ability, having evolved other ways of gathering nutrients.
Erectile dysfunction can be hard. No, this is not a joke, even though that pun was absolutely intended. The simple fact is that ED can have psychologically devastating effects that we shouldn't make light of. If folks are too ashamed to talk about these issues, they're more likely to turn to things like male enhancement coffee.
We see hundreds or even thousands of images a day, and almost all of them have been digitally manipulated in some way. Some have gotten basic color corrections or simple Instagram filter effects, while others have received full on Photoshop jobs to completely transform the subject. It turns out humans aren't very good at recognizing when an image has been manipulated, even if the change is fairly substantial. Hany Farid is a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College who specializes in photo forensics, and while he can't share all of his fancy software tools for detecting editing trickery, he has shared a few tips for authenticating images on your own.
Turns out bacteria cells might not actually outnumber your own, but there's still a heck of a lot of the little buggers living all over you. And since you're already sharing the rest of yourself with your partner—your bed, your shower, your saliva—it makes sense that you'd share bacterial colonies too.
NASA is forever linked to space, a plucky government agency bravely hurtling people and robots into the great beyond. Yet the agency has always had as much of an earth-bound mission as an outer space one. The “Aeronautics” at NASA may get short shrift, but with 300 videos of archival aviation tests released online this week, there's plenty of airborne excitement waiting for viewers.
If humans are ever really going to make it to Mars, we're going to need a bigger boat. Today's spaceships are built for short hauls to and from the International Space Station, a mere six or so hours away. These ships, like the Russian Soyuz, SpaceX's Dragon, NASA's upcoming Orion capsule, are small, cramped, and they don't have bathrooms or sleeping quarters.
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