Category: Story

You probably can’t remember what it feels like to play Super Mario Bros. for the very first time, but try to picture it. An 8-bit game world blinks into being: baby blue sky, tessellated stone ground, and in between, a squat, red-suited man standing still—waiting. He’s facing rightward; you nudge him farther in that direction.…

Stay on target. That’s the mantra you hear in labs and biotech companies around the world as they snip away at DNA. All the techniques for gene editing—from the famous Crispr-Cas9 to the older TALENs and zinc-finger nucleases—share a problem: Sometimes they don’t work. Which is to say, they have “off-target effects,” changing a gene…

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder include uncontrolled memories of a traumatic event, anxiety and panic—“hyperarousal” is the technical term—depression, avoiding anything that’s a reminder of the event, self-destructive behavior, and more. It’s the only psychiatric disorder where people are pretty sure of the cause: emotionally traumatic events, from the death of a loved one…

When it comes to detecting new organisms that emerge from exotic places and cause global havoc, the US military is ready. The Pentagon operates infectious disease labs and surveillance networks in places like Kenya, Georgia, and Thailand, as well as a giant research center and vaccine-making unit just outside Washington, DC. All that effort makes…

For patients with epilepsy, or cancerous brain lesions, sometimes the only way to forward is down. Down past the scalp and into the skull, down through healthy grey matter to get at a tumor or the overactive network causing seizures. At the end of the surgery, all that extra white and grey matter gets tossed…

When it became possible to remove a tumor from a patient and study it in a dish, the field of oncology was transformed. Sergiu Paşca, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, wants psychiatry to experience the same kind of revolution. Yet the brain presents an even greater challenge than cancer. Without the option of simply cutting…

In the aftermath of the massacre of 26 people in a small-town Texas church, you might have seen that the killer used a gun called an AR-15. It’s a popular weapon—relatively easy to use, endlessly customizable, military in appearance. How popular? It’s the same gun that a killer used in the massacre of 58 people…

Last Wednesday, at 3:45 pm, scientists from the Breakthrough Listen project trained the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia on 'Oumuamua—the mysterious, oblong space-rock which last month became the first known object to enter our solar system from elsewhere in the universe—and scanned it for signs of intelligent life. For six hours, astronomers interrogated the…

It's been almost two weeks since Hurricane Harvey began its assault on southeastern Texas, and communities throughout the region have set off down the long, hard road to recovery. FEMA administrator Brock Long and Texas governor Greg Abbott both said last week that it will take years to rebuild homes, salvage businesses, shore up infrastructure,…

Robots seem so far away. We’re so many years from Jetsons-esque machines that live among us and wash our dishes and fold our clothes. But the reality is the robots have arrived—you’re just not noticing them. Take a robot called Tug, for instance. No, Tug can't talk philosophy with you, and Tug can't do your…