A new study has identified the best way to flash freeze living tissue, which could lead to better human egg and stem cell storage.
The technique could dramatically improve the odds that frozen, unfertilized eggs could …

Pentagon officials have been talking for years about weaning their jets off of fossil fuels. Now they say they’re only months away from producing a cheap fuel made from algae — for less than $3 …

A team of mechanical engineering students at California Polytechnic State University is prepping an ultra high-mileage, three-wheeled car for the upcoming Shell Eco-Marathon student competition. If all goes well, they’ll take first place with fuel …

The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources.
Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours …

Longevity is one of the hottest areas of science, but there’s a curious hole in the research: Scientifically speaking, nobody knows how to measure aging, much less predict reliably how people will respond to time’s …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to wake up this morning to find that Sultan Kösen is now using a photo from my interview with him as his Facebook photo.
I met Kösen last …

Just a week at high altitudes can cause sustained weight loss, suggesting that a mountain retreat could be a viable strategy for slimming down.
Overweight, sedentary people who spent a week at an elevation of 8,700 …

Another week, another colorful feathered dinosaur. Hot on the heels of a recent report identifying pigments in fossilized dino feathers and filaments (SN Online: 1/27/10), a different team of scientists says that it has mapped …