Nearly 15 years after the first managerial team of Biosphere 2 was ordered out by federal marshals, scientists yearn for a way to fulfill the true promise of Earth-in-a-bubble experiments. “We need to do this again, and better,” said Daniel Botkin a University of California, Santa Barbara naturalist who sat on Biosphere 2′s original advisory committee. “We don’t understand... 

Once upon a time, researchers knew that DNA contained four nucleotides: A, T, C and G. Then they found a fifth. And now they’ve found a sixth. Called 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, it’s a form of the fifth nucleotide, technically known as 5-methylcytosine. Like its forerunner, it helps turn genes on and off, but in ways that researchers didn’t expect. “I think this finding will electrify... 

This just in: Red pandas like candy! That’s the latest from a group of researchers at Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center. The team gave zoo animals a choice between plain water and water sweetened with either natural or artificial sugars as part of a study on the genetics of taste. Ferrets, genets, meerkats, mongooses and lions shunned the artificial sugars. That was unsurprising... 

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this spectacular space fireworks display when a blob of matter within a 5,000-light-year-long plasma beam emanating from a giant black hole flared up. The glowing clump of gas, first discovered in 1999 and named HST-1, is located in one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 54 million light years away from Earth. It... 

A seafaring band of scientists, engineers and yachtsmen with an obsession for Jules Verne and clean energy are building what they call the largest solar boat in the world, a $13 million catamaran they hope will take them around the world next year. Construction is well underway on the 98-foot-long vessel, which will feature 5,059 square feet of photovoltaic cells. The project is being funded by Rivendell... 

How much do you think rich people are paying for staying in the most expensive hotel in NYC? $34,000 per night for 4300 square foot top luxury apartment in the 52nd floor of Four Seasons hotel. Apartment has a stunning view including all New York bridges, Status of Liberty and Central Park. Don’t forget that you get a personal chauffeur and either Rolls Royce Phantom or a Mercedes Maybach car included... 

A truck is a vehicle for carrying goods and materials. The word “truck” possibly derives from the Greek “trochos”, meaning “wheel.” In North America, the big wheels of wagons were called trucks. When the gasoline-engine driven trucks came into fashion, these were called “motor trucks.” Lorry is a term from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland,... 

After a banner 2008, clean tech funding took a nasty dive in the first three months of 2009, dropping to under $1 billion, according to two research firms. Though comparable numbers are not yet available for other venture capital sectors like software and biotechnology, both The Cleantech Group and GTM Research calculated drops in green tech funding to $1 billion and $836 million, respectively. The... 

North America’s cradle of civilization can be traced 3,800 years back to the lower Illinois River valley. It’s there that archaeologists have found evidence of the continent’s first so-called agricultural complex — a set of different crops, rather than a single domesticated plant species. A rough biological analogue of an agricultural complex is a multicellular animal: It represents... 

The brains of patients who’ve received double hand transplants can recreate lost neurological control systems, according to new brain data from a French surgical team. The doctors extensively analyzed two patients, of the six total who had the surgery, for evidence of how they learn to reuse their hands. It’s well-known that after a limb has been amputated, a body’s nervous system... 

1869: Neurosurgery pioneer Harvey Cushing is born. His achievements in medicine and the telling of its history will become legendary. After undergraduate work at Yale, Cushing entered Harvard Medical School, following his great-grandfather, grandfather, father and elder brother into the profession. His stern father warned him on this occasion not to indulge in “smoking, drinking, boating, baseball... 

The Department of Energy’s $3.5 billion laser, designed to simulate the energy of a nuclear explosion, is ready to fire up all of its 192 beams, AP reported Tuesday. After more than a decade, that included several delays and cost overruns (it was initially supposed to cost $700 million), the world’s most powerful laser has been certified by the DOE and is ready to begin experiments, some... 

A newly-reconstructed deformed fossil skull suggests that our human ancestors probably cared for deformed offspring for years. The skull indicates that the human to which it belonged about 530,000 years ago would have been severely handicapped — and yet survived at least five years and possibly several years longer. That suggests that the child’s parents must have provided the child with care,... 

It’s taken 10 years, but Richard Jenkins has at long last achieved his dream of setting the land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle. The British engineer climbed into the land yacht he calls the Ecotricity Greenbird and peeled off a 126.1-mph run across a California desert Thursday to take his place in the record books. His record-setting dash eclipsed the previous benchmark, which American... 

Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives. If oil prices rise... 

For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth. The asteroid was spotted entering Earth’s atmosphere over Sudan in October and was believed to have fully disintegrated, but an international team found almost 280 pieces of meteorite in a 11-square-mile section of Sudan’s Nubian... 

Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano is erupting explosively for a fifth time since 10:38 p.m. local time Sunday evening (2:38 a.m. Eastern time). The U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Volcano Observatory estimates the initial explosion sent ash up to 50,000 feet in the air. The ash appears to be heading north away from Anchorage. Alaska Airlines has canceled flights, according to the Associated Press. Redoubt... 

An underwater volcano exploded near Tonga in the South Pacific to stunning effect this week. The pictures of gas and steam erupting out of the surface of the water captivated the world. Here at Wired Science, we love volcanoes — so we decided to use the Tongan eruption to round up some of our favorite volcano eruption pics and present them as big. Above, you can see Mt. Cleveland in Alaska erupting... 

A new battery material that recharges 100 times faster than the lithium-ion in your laptop has been revealed by researchers at MIT. The discovery could lead to cellphone-sized batteries that could be charged in 10 seconds. “The ability to charge and discharge batteries in a matter of seconds rather than hours may open up new technological applications and induce lifestyle changes,” wrote... 

Behold the mesmerizing mundanity of space! NASA has transformed the external camera on the International Space Station into a live webcam — and the view is fascinatingly dull. For its inaugural morning, the webcam showed a live space walk by US Commander Mike Fincke and Russian flight engineer Yury Lonchakov complete with commentary from an announcer (“That’s Fincke in the red stripes”)....