Science

Yes, death is inevitable — but just how predictable is it?

A technique developed by researchers in Finland and Estonia could pinpoint individuals with a high risk of dying within as few as five years by examining their blood.

Scientists screened more than 17,000 samples looking for biomarkers, or biological indicators of abnormalities, that were present in the blood of people who had died not long after their blood was drawn. The study, which was published in PLOS Medicine, used a cost-effective method of screening mass amounts of blood called NMR Spectroscopy.

Fibers spun by the Bombyx mori silkworm have been used for thousands of years to produce soft, flowing fabrics to cloak the outsides of our bodies. Now researchers are working to put silk inside our bodies with surgical screws and plates made from B. mori cocoons.

Influenza viruses evolve rapidly, making it hard to develop protective vaccines against them. Despite a great deal of effort, scientists have found it difficult to forecast which way the virus’ evolution would take it. Now, thanks to improvements in our ability to study viruses and a new mathematical model, anticipating influenza’s next move appears possible.

NASA today announced the discovery of 715 planets orbiting 305 stars, revealing multi-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Four of these newly verified planets are in their sun's habitable zone, a distance from a star where the temperature is conducive to the planet's having water in liquid form. With water, it's possible these four planets could potentially hold life.

As we’ve learned from our recent explorations of Mars, there’s really not a whole lot going on there. Yes, there are geological processes at work, but most of them move at a nearly imperceptible pace. So that's why after nearly ten years of Martian rover exploration, NASA scientists were surprised to see a rock suddenly “appear” in front of the Mars Rover last week.

A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness published in  Elsevier’s Physics of Life Reviews (open access) claims that consciousness derives from deeper-level, finer-scale activities inside brain neurons.

Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists have found that ultrasound directed to a specific region of the brain can boost performance in sensory discrimination. The study provides the first demonstration that low-intensity, transcranial-focused ultrasound (tFUS) can modulate human brain activity to enhance perception.

You're only as young as you think you are. But what if you could re-train your brain to absorb information as easily as a child can?

That's exactly what scientists testing the FDA-approved drug called valproate investigated in study of adults who had little or no musical training yet demonstrated some degree of absolute pitch, an ability to identify or produce the pitch of a musical sound without any reference point.

Meiji University professor Hiroshi Nagashima is creating chimeric pigs, which carry genetic material from two different species, BBC News reports. It starts off by making what Nagashima calls “a-pancreatic” embryos. Inside the white pig embryo, the gene that carries the instructions for developing the animal’s pancreas has been “switched off.”

The Japanese team then introduces stem cells from a black pig into the embryo. What they have discovered is that as the pig develops, it will be normal except for its pancreas, which will be genetically a black pig’s.

For a while now number crunching physicists have been working on a theory that everything around us is just a hologram.

Now, two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, compelling evidence that the theory might be true. In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena came up with a model of the universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings and could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics.  As you do.