Waving his smartphone at the audience, Stanford bioengineer Drew Endy said, “I’m trying to grow one of these.” Let the day of mindblowing conversations about the future of biology begin. Endy joined Google Director of...
You might not think that a guy who says he spends his day getting lost "in a microworld of flowers or corals that you made yourself" is making a major contribution to science. But Wim...
Imagine shrubs monitoring pollution levels, weeds storing electronic devices, and flowers detecting explosives and chemical weapons. Sounds like science fiction, but bionic plant life is not as far-fetched as you might think, according to new...
Setting up high school students with atomic-force microscopes and optical profilers so they can study nanotechnology may seem like a science teacher’s dream, but it’s already happening in at least one school in the United...
In the future, everyone on Earth will have ubiquitous access to outer space. That might seem to be a bold statement or to border on science fiction, yet a glance back in time at the...
Here's a new barometer for measuring a technology's disruptive potential: "If there's not a capacity to exploit something for evil, it's probably not that revolutionary." That's one way 27-year-old Skybox Imaging co-founder Julian Mann explains...
While space travel remains exclusive to professional astronauts and the superwealthy, operating your own robot in space is close to becoming an affordable reality for average Earthlings. NanoSatisfi, a Kickstarter-funded startup, is building open-source nanosatellites...
In 2004, two UK scientists used a piece of Scotch tape to isolate single layers of graphene from a block of graphite, or pencil lead. Ever since, physicists and materials scientists have been trying to...
When genomics pioneer George Church recently announced that he and his team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering will vie in a September 2013 competition to rapidly and accurately sequence 100 whole human...
