Nearly every person who has had their entire genome sequenced will gather in a single room near Boston on April 27. It’s the last time this will ever happen. Within a year, the dozens of people in this elite group will have been joined by a thousand or more people. Soon after that, hobbyists may be roaming the streets with handheld DNA analyzers, high school athletes may experiment with gene therapy... 

A short period of fasting prior to chemotherapy may protect healthy cells but leave cancer cells vulnerable to drugs, according to a new study. The results are very preliminary, based on animal research and a case study of just 10 people. But if they hold up, doctors could have a new tool for reducing chemotherapy’s side effects and safely administering larger doses. “Side effects aren’t just,... 

As the sun reawakens from an anomalously quiet period, keep track of solar flares, sunspots and coronal mass ejections with a new iPhone app that puts the real-time status of the sun in your hand. “This is more than cool,” Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said in a press release. “It’s transformative. For the first time ever, we can monitor the sun as a living, breathing... 

Call it a 10:1 scale model. After a childhood and adulthood spent lusting for a Tamiya Sand Scorcher R/C car kit, we’ve finally found something to top our wish lists: the real thing. The folks at Bug Box, a Volkswagen customization and restoration shop in Germany, created a life-size model of the iconic R/C car for the Nuremberg Toy Fair to celebrate the re-release of the Sand Scorcher, itself a... 

A new technique that uses a laser to vaporize materials like rocks and steel to analyze their chemical composition is finding new applications from Mars to forensics. Thanks to its relatively small size and low cost, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy is emerging from the laboratory and turning into a precise tool for figuring out what something is made of. What had been a technique largely for... 

With just $100 worth of plywood and screws, almost anyone can build a shelter known as a Hexayurt that can last three years and possibly even withstand a hurricane. The simple DIY structure could be a critical temporary solution for some of the estimated 1 million or more people left homeless in quake-torn Haiti. Aid agencies have distributed around 10,000 tents to Haiti so far, according to to the... 

The California coast has seen fewer foggy days in the last century, threatening the health of the region’s majestic redwood trees. Over the last century, new research suggests the average daily fog has decreased more than three hours, causing the coast redwoods to lose more water in the dry summer season, leaving them more susceptible to drought. “Redwoods are an iconic species and we all love... 

Of all science’s model organisms, none is as weird as Dictyostelium discoideum, a single-celled amoeba better known as slime mold. When they run out of food, millions coalesce into a single, slug-like creature that wanders in search of nutrients, then forms a mushroom-like stalk, scatters as spores and starts the cycle again. In the rules governing the behavior of these creatures, researchers hope... 

Once Martian sand grains hop, they don’t stop. That’s the conclusion of a new study that finds sand can move on Mars without much windy encouragement. Mars’ sandy surface has clearly been shaped by wind. Its characteristic dunes and ripples are the kind formed by sand particles taking short wind-borne hops, a process called saltation. But atmospheric simulations and landers’ direct measurements... 

The Pentagon’s scientific fringe want to fast-track the quick and easy repair of wartime wounds, by eliminating one of the most important elements of tissue engineering – and replacing it with magnetic fields. Last year, Darpa-funded researchers successfully generated human muscle tissue, and the agency requested proposals for a device that could pump out new body parts made with adult stem... 

A new analysis shows that a deadly mud volcano in Indonesia may not have been a natural disaster after all. The research lends weight to the controversial theory that the volcano was caused by humans. Villagers near Sidoarjo noticed a mud volcano beginning to erupt at 5 a.m. local time May 29, 2006. It was about 500 feet from a local gas-exploration well. Every day since then, the Lusi mud volcano... 

The beautiful hourglass-shaped nebula Sharpless 2-106 shines with brilliant colors in this new image from the Gemini North telescope. Giant star S106IR lies near the waist of the hourglass. Astronomers estimate the star could be up to 15 times more massive than our sun. The winds the star sends ripping through space appear to have generated the nebula’s distinctive shape. Scientists believe that... 

The mystery of why galaxies formed early in the history of the universe give birth to more stars than modern ones has been solved. An abundance of dense, cold gas fueled rapid star formation in these early galaxies, according to a new study. Astronomers collected signals from 19 different 8- to 10-billion-year old galaxies scattered across the northern sky. These early-universe stellar nurseries had... 

A newly discovered mechanism of antibiotic resistance helps explain how bacteria have so quickly undermined medicine’s front-line defenses, turning miracle drugs into duds in just a few decades. Scientists have long known that exposing bacteria to the right antibiotics will kill most of them, but leave a few mutants that happen to be resistant. These mutants will go on to multiply, and eventually... 

Space is a pretty empty place. But it’s not completely empty, as a new map of the interstellar space surrounding the 1,000 light-years around the sun shows. Using the light from 1,857 stars, a team of French and American astronomers were able to measure the density of the gas surrounding us by examining fine differences in the starlight. They confirmed the presence of the Local Cavity, represented... 

Meet Inuk, a 4,000-year-old man known from a tuft of hair found in Greenland permafrost. In those frozen strands, enough DNA was preserved to sequence the first ancient-human genome and confirm an unexpected ancient migration from Siberia to the New World, plus a few of Inuk’s own traits. Along with brown eyes, brown skin and facial hair, he had “a tendency to baldness,” said Eske Willerslev,... 

You’ve undoubtedly seen the smudge of the Orion Nebula hanging just below his belt thousands of times, but the most beautiful image yet of the celestial body was just released Wednesday. The European Southern Observatory’s new VISTA telescope’s enormous field of view allows it to image the entire nebula at once. It’s been designed to capture near-infrared light. The longer wavelengths of light... 

Scientists have unearthed an almost perfectly preserved spider fossil in China dating back to the middle Jurassic era, 165 million years ago. The fossilized spiders, Eoplectreurys gertschi, are older than the only two other specimens known by around 120 million years. The level of detail preserved in the fossils is amazing, said paleontologist Paul Selden of the University of Kansas and lead author... 

With feathers that resonate at precisely 1,500 hertz, the male club-winged manakin is perhaps the bird world’s most perfectly tuned example of sexual selection. By pinning down the frequency, researchers have completed a long investigation into the bird’s sonic physiology and showed just how far some guys go to impress the ladies. “The fundamental anatomy of the wings has been completely reworked... 

A watched pot never boils, but an electrically charged pot sometimes freezes. sciencenewsA study in the Feb. 5 Science reports that water can freeze at different temperatures depending on whether the surface it rests on is positively or negatively charged. Under certain conditions, water can even freeze as it heats up. “We are very, very surprised by this result,” says study coauthor Igor Lubomirsky...