Science

The U.S. Defense Department recently began testing a laser that might someday be affixed to drones to knock incoming missiles out of the sky.

Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, nominated by the Obama administration to replace Army Gen. Martin Dempsey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he agrees with Navy Adm. William Gortney, head of U.S. Northern Command, on the need for the military to develop ways to thwart ballistic missiles earlier in flight, possibly with lasers.

Researchers funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering have designed a nanoparticle transport system for gene delivery that destroys deadly brain gliomas in a rat model, significantly extending the lives of the treated animals. The nanoparticles are filled with genes for an enzyme that converts a prodrug called ganciclovir into a potent destroyer of the glioma cells.

Watch your language. Words mean different things to different people – so the brainwaves they provoke could be a way to identify you.

Blair Armstrong of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language in Spain and his team recorded the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms – such as FBI or DVD – then used computer programs to spot differences between individuals. The participants' responses varied enough that the programs could identify the volunteers with about 94 per cent accuracy when the experiment was repeated.

When you start talking about cosmic measurements, most people have a hard time truly comprehending the figures involved. They become abstract, conceptual -- so much larger than any human experience.

So the age of the universe just seems like a number, but it's a very big number: roughly 13.8 billion years. That means the "edge" of the universe is 13.8 billion light-years away -- so far away that we've never been able to observe it.

Canadian researchers are reporting the discovery of a "reset" switch for our body clocks that operates at the molecular level, a finding that could lead to treatments for conditions linked to disruptions of our circadian rhythm.

The discovery could yield a better understanding of a number of disorders linked to such disruptions, from sleep disturbances to behavioral or metabolic problems common with jet lag or shift work, they say.

In our culture, reproduction is often seen as women’s work. From pregnancy to childbirth through nursing a newborn child, women are often expected to take the central role in creating new life by default. Similarly, when problems of infertility arise, the focus is often slanted toward females.

For several weeks, rumors have been circulating that a research group in China had performed the first targeted editing of DNA in human embryos. Today, the rumors were confirmed by the appearance of a paper in the journal Protein & Cell, describing genome editing performed at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. The paper shows that while the technique can work, it doesn't work very efficiently, suggesting there are a lot of hurdles between existing techniques and widespread genetic engineering of humanity.

A new study examined the galaxy cluster Abell 3827 and found indications that dark matter could be self-interacting. If confirmed, this would mark a significant step forward in the ongoing quest to understand the substance that helps structure the Universe.

A potential method of treating Alzheimer's disease using ultrasound is being hailed as a "breakthrough."

A team of researchers at the University of Queensland's Queensland Brain Institute Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research have successfully restored memory function in mice using the drug-free, non-invasive technology to break down the neurotoxic amyloid plaques that cause memory loss and loss of cognitive function.

A solid tumour is the perfect example of a complex adaptive system at work. It is an ecosystem with competitive and cooperative networks of cells at play. This is one of the reasons why cancer is so difficult to treat.