Science

A recently developed technique can glean a huge amount of information from tiny samples of genetic material called environmental DNA, or eDNA, that humans and animals leave behind everywhere -- including in the air.

The tool could lead to a range of medical and scientific advances, and could even help track down criminals, according to the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Climate change does not make cyclones, such as that battering Bangladesh, more frequent but it does render them more intense and destructive, according to climatologists and weather experts.

These immensely powerful natural phenomena have different labels according to the region they hit, but cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are all violent tropical storms that can generate 10 times as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

An estimated 295 million people suffer from visual impairment globally. Around 43 million of those people are living with blindness. While not every form of blindness can be cured, recent scientific breakthroughs have uncovered new ways to treat some forms of inherited blindness through gene therapy.

Jean Bennett is a gene therapy expert and a professor emeritus of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her laboratory developed the first gene therapy drug for a genetic disease to be approved in the U.S. The drug, Luxturna, treats patients with biallelic RPE65 mutation-associated retinal dystrophy, a rare genetic disorder that causes visual impairments and blindness in patients early in life.

Editor’s note: This article contains plot spoilers.

Society’s understanding of technology and cybersecurity often is based on simple stereotypes and sensational portrayals in the entertainment media. I’ve written about how certain scenarios are entertaining but misleading. Think of black-clad teenage hackers prowling megacities challenging corporate villains. Or think of counterintelligence specialists repositioning a satellite from the back of a surveillance van via a phone call.

Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had outlived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son.

“I don’t have any meaningful relationships left, dear,” she told me. “They’ve all died. And you know what? Underneath it all, I want to leave this world too.” Leaning a little closer, as though she was telling me a secret, she continued:

A Dr. Phil episode that features mothers touting the benefits of magic mushrooms shows that psilocybin is becoming more mainstream, SFGate reports.

“Moms on Mushrooms”: A Growing Trend?, which aired May 4, shows two mothers who claim the use of magic mushrooms has benefited their mental health and made them parents.

Fast radio bursts – intense, milliseconds-long flashes of radio energy from outer space – have puzzled astronomers since they were first spotted in 2007. A single burst can emit as much energy in its brief life as the Sun does in a few days.

The great majority of the short-lived pulses originate outside our Milky Way galaxy. We don’t know what produces most of them, or how.

How did we get here? Where are we going? And how long will it take? These questions are as old as humanity itself, and, if they’ve already been asked by other species elsewhere in the Universe, potentially very much older than that.

They are also some of the fundamental questions we are trying to answer in the study of the Universe, called cosmology. One cosmological conundrum is how fast the Universe is expanding, which is measured by a number called the Hubble constant. And there is quite a bit of tension around it.