Science | featured news

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: The best way for most of us to watch asteroid 2012 DA14 come within 17,200 miles of Earth, and then recede harmlessly into the cosmos, is to watch the show online.

The Mars rover Curiosity drilled into the Martian surface for the first time as part of an effort to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system ever had conditions to support microbial life, NASA said on Saturday.

More than 500 years after his death in battle, scientists announced Monday that they had definitively identified a skeleton unearthed in northern England last summer as that of Richard III, the medieval king portrayed by Shakespeare as a homicidal tyrant who killed his two young nephews in order to ascend the throne.

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

"This second hypothesis says that when we settled down, and in conjunction with the development of agriculture, we produced waste dumps around our settlements; and suddenly there was this new food resource, a new niche, for wolves to make use of, and the wolf that was best able to make use of it became the ancestor of the dog," explained Erik Axelsson from Uppsala University.

Another company joined the commercial space race Tuesday with ambitious plans to mine asteroids near Earth, but experts say the physics and economics of the Final Frontier remain still daunting.

...It turns out that extreme excitement and extreme anger look very similar. We believe we distinguish these feelings by gazing at people’s faces, reading them for subtle changes in emotion. But researchers recently found that people more accurately understand mood when they examine body language.

Cambridge University scientists say they have seen four-stranded DNA at work in human cells for the first time and wonder if it might provide a target for the development of novel anti-cancer treatments.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, geneticist George Church made some headlines by claiming that it will be possible to clone a Neanderthal in the near future.

It has the makings of a science fiction movie: Zap someone's brain with mild jolts of electricity to try to stave off the creeping memory loss of Alzheimer's disease....