sciencealert.com — If building a super-secure, super-smart 'quantum internet' is ever going to be possible, then quantum-entangled photons are likely to be essential in building it – and scientists just figured out a very useful new way of generating them. Full Article >>

nationalgeographic.com — A curious life-form that lives in the park’s thermal pools makes a protein that changed the course of biomedical history. Enzymes are a key component in polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a method used widely in labs around the world to study small samples of genetic material by making millions of …

popsci.com — Last year, while combing through NASA’s archives, two planetary scientists noticed something earlier analyses had overlooked—a blip in Uranus’s magnetic field as the spacecraft cruised through a magnetic bubble of sorts. The new result, which appeared last summer in Geophysical Research Letters, com…

sciencealert.com — Though an asteroid strike seems kind of ephemeral right now, it's a real threat, and one that has the potential to end humanity. Agencies like NASA and the ESA are still working on their plans to protect us from that threat. NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission is scheduled to lau…

arstechnica.com — Last summer, NASA put out a call for companies who would be willing to deliver cargo to a proposed station in orbit around the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway. On Friday, NASA announced that the first award under this "Gateway Logistics" contract would go to SpaceX. The company has proposed using it…

sciencemag.org — Chinese scientists at the front of that country’s outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have not been particularly accessible to foreign media. Many have been overwhelmed trying to understand their epidemic and combat it, and responding to media requests, especially from journalists outsid…

techcrunch.com — There’s a new COVID-19 test from healthcare technology maker Abbott that looks to be the fastest yet in terms of producing results, and that can do so on the spot right at point-of-care, without requiring a round trip to a lab. This test for the novel coronavirus causing the current global pandemic …

nationalgeographic.com — Changes in the pathogen help scientists follow cases without widespread testing—and show the virus isn't a bioweapon. Think of the open-source project Nextstrain.org as an outbreak museum. Labs around the world contribute genetic sequences of viruses collected from patients, and Nextstrain uses tha…

phys.org — There may be a small answer to one of the biggest problems on the planet. German researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology that they have identified and characterized a strain of bacteria capable of degrading some of the chemical building blocks of polyurethane. "The bacteria can…

theness.com — The short answer to the question – how do you boost your immune system – is that you can’t. The very concept of “boosting” the immune system is not scientific and does not exist within mainstream medicine. That’s because it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of immunity, and of biological sy…