The quest started with trying to make better yogurt. Bacteria that uses a tiny molecular machine to kill attacking viruses could change the way that scientists edit the DNA of plants, animals and fungi, revolutionizing genetic engineering. The protein, called Cas9, is quite simply a way to more accurately cut a piece of DNA.    

Scientists have used brain scans to decode imagery directly from the brain. Brain researchers can tell whom a person is thinking about by scanning the human brain.  For the first time they have been able to identify what people are imagining from imaging technologies.      

Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. A single molecular switch, that when flipped, helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability.    

The presence of human cells made the mice’s brains function better. Scientists discover that human brains cells transplanted into mice’s brains make the mice smarter.  These results shed light on how important a certain overlooked class of brain cells are in human brains.      

A remarkable Empire of One business  Rich Burlew created the first The Order of the Stick, a hilarious webcomic that celebrates and satirizes tabletop role-playing games and medieval fantasy, on September 29, 2003. The strip was originally produced to entertain people who came to his website for gaming articles, but it quickly became the most popular feature, leading Burlew to eventually abandon writing articles [...]

Recently, someone in the office came across the home that inspired Tony Stark’s house in the Iron Man movies (it’s real, but not quite as extravagantly located). Instead of talking about that actual home, we launched into a debate about Stark’s fictional palace and the many, many expensive things he’d keep inside. Debating his home [...]

Dolphins are the only other living beings on the planet to assign such specific monikers to known family members and associates. One of the defining characteristics of human intelligence is language.  We like to think that the complexity of our social interactions is one of the things that makes humans unique, but we do know [...]

Bitcoins are completely digital, so you can’t spend actual ones like these (non-digital ones) at a digital casino. As various tech companies report their fourth-quarter 2012 earnings numbers this week, so are two gray-market, Bitcoin-based casinos—and one is turning profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars after only six months of being in business [...]

When heated atoms can move with different levels of energy, from low to high. With positive temperatures (blue), atoms more likely occupy low-energy states than high-energy states, while the opposite is true for negative temperatures (red). The coldest temperature possible is most often thought to be absolute zero.  Researchers have now shown they can achieve [...]

The new technology is known as coded TCP. Wireless bandwidth has been improved by academic researchers.  They didn’t do this by adding base stations, tapping more spectrum, or cranking up transmitter wattage, but by using algebra to eliminate the network-clogging task of resending dropped packets of data.