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Abigail Allwood is a translator. But instead of reading ancient texts, she reads ancient rocks, and for the past decade, the Australian astrobiologist has been exploring the most remote wilderness on earth in search of microscopic fingerprints of life. She uses a tool called the PIXL, which she invented as a postdoc: It fires a…

Susumu Tonegawa’s presence announces itself as soon as you walk through the door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. A three-foot-high framed photograph of Tonegawa stands front and center in the high-ceilinged lobby, flanked by a screen playing a looping rainbow-hued clip of recent research highlights. Quanta Magazine About…

Day by day, human beings grow more and more inadequate. Robots steal our jobs. They can burn us in a foot race. And they can even read our damn minds. Now a little robot from the University of California Berkeley is putting on a jumping clinic. Meet Salto, the bot that not only leaps four…

There's a new video game in development for all you science nerds, and it has an advisor you might recognize. No, not me—just another one of your favorite physicists-turned-science educators, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The game is Space Odyssey, a space exploration caper that takes you on a journey to explore and settle new planets. Currently,…

At 2:39 am Thursday morning, millions of Bay Area residents from Sacramento to San Jose were shaken awake by the rolling tremble of a 4.4 magnitude earthquake. The eight-mile deep tremor struck along the Hayward fault, two miles southeast of Berkeley. From my apartment just 20 blocks from the epicenter, I woke with the rest…

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…