Last year was a very bad year for wildfire damage across the U.S., and it’s only going to get worse. One way to counteract this increasing danger is to build smarter. A new study shows just how bad the problem has gotten, and suggests building smarter means being more intentional about where we build.
Here’s a joke for you: What has one horrible mouth and no butt? Your great-great-great-great-great-(etc.) grandpa, probably.
A striking, two-faced calf has become a bit of a local star the small town of Campbellsville, Kentucky. Lucky has now managed to survive nearly fifty days, despite a developmental abnormality that causes most animals to die before birth.
Cupertino mayor Barry Chang is apparently not an Apple fanboy. In a fiery interview with The Guardian, Chang says he was kicked out of Apple HQ when he was a city councilman. He was hoping to have a meeting about the city’s growing traffic congestion to which Apple contributes considerably. He didn’t get one.
Siri let slip yesterday that Apple’s WWDC conference—the week-long exploration of Apple’s software development—would begin on June 13th. Apple’s since confirmed it to be the case.
This is Mahabir Pun. Fed up with the fact that he had to hike for two days whenever he wanted to check his email, he decided to connect his home town of Nangi to the Internet. This video explains how he did it.
In what sounds like a plot line from a BioShock game, a team of biologists has coaxed an animal into growing a new head and brain resembling those of a different species. The bizarre accomplishment adds to a growing body of research highlighting the importance of non-DNA factors—collectively known as the…
Northeastern University biologist Jonathan Tilly is certain he’s found egg-making stem cells in adult mice. If he’s right, it would refute decades-old work that showed female mammals finish making all their eggs before or shortly after birth. This might make it possible to grow new eggs inside the ovaries of older…
You know the story of mammalian fertilization: millions of sperm enter the vagina, only one fertilizes the egg, more than one messes up the embryo, yadda yadda yadda. Turns out that’s not the only way it can work.
Aditya Bandopadhyay has treated the sick for more than twenty years. He works in the village of Salbadra, in the state of West Bengal, India. He has no degree in medicine.
The tuatara isn’t actually a lizard. It’s the last survivor of a 250 million year old group of reptiles that mostly went extinct with the dinosaurs. It doesn’t have a penis, and ironically, that’s made it a linchpin for understanding how penises evolved in vertebrates.
Last week at Buzzfeed News, Dan Vergano described the surprising results of a paternity test–the first known case of a man fathering the son of a brother he didn’t know existed. It’s an example of a rare genetic condition known as chimerism.
A few months ago I wrote about a proposal to fix the housing crisis in San Francisco by building skinny apartments in the medians of its streets. Little did I know this idea was already being prototyped in a place that has even bigger streets than San Francisco, due to the unique way it was built.
Today, a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics tied male homosexuality to chemical markers on DNA that affect how genes are expressed.
From satellites, to autonomous solar-powered drones, or balloons, there have been plenty of ideas recently on how to connect up the world. Facebook, Google, large international organisations, national governments, even Bono, have laid out ideas of a near future in which we are all hooked into the network.
Facebook has announced that it’s teaming up with French-based satellite provider Eutelsat Communications to beam free internet to 14 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Developmental biologists noticed back in the 1990s that a lot of the genes that make a penis are the same as the ones that make limbs. They’ve been finding new similarities ever since. Ed Yong, writing at his occasionally penis-obsessed blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, explains how legless, but not penis-less snakes…
Hormone surges at puberty trigger a lot of physical changes in both men and women, morphing child-bodies into adult forms. Genitals, hips, and muscle mass change, obviously–but so do faces. A new study suggests those facial changes are primed to happen by the presence of testosterone in utero.
Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You, a new BBC series focused on how our prenatal development shapes our lives, has brought new attention to a group of seemingly sex-swapping people in the Dominican Republic.
The United Nations’ Broadband Commission has published a new report whose headline finding is that 57 percent of the human population — or around 4.2 billion people — will still not have access to the internet by the end of 2015.
