If starships are ever built, it will be in the far future. But that does not deter the intrepid band of scientists who are thinking about how to do it SPACE, as Douglas Adams pointed out in... Read more
BIOFILMS are a problem in medicine. When bacteria gang up to form the continuous sheets that bear this name they are far harder to kill with antibiotics than when they just float around as i... Read more
Good teachers have a surprisingly big impact on their pupils’ future income THERE are few policy questions to which improving the quality of education is not a reasonable answer. Yet assessi... Read more
NOT every commodity contributes both to the gaiety of existence and life-saving technology. Helium does not just fill balloons and render voices squeaky. In gaseous form the inert, lighter-t... Read more
A group of stem-cell biologists have grown an “organoid” that resembles a brain REGENERATIVE medicine, the science of producing tissues and organs from stem cells, is a rapidly developing fi... Read more
New technology is poised to disrupt America’s schools, and then the world’s IN A small school on the South Side of Chicago, 40 children between the ages of five and six sit quietly learning... Read more
IN AMERICA alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the... Read more
Collaborative consumption: Technology makes it easier for people to rent items to each other. But as it grows, the “sharing economy” is hitting roadblocks WHY pay through the nose for someth... Read more
IN “SKYFALL”, the latest James Bond movie, 007 is given a gun that only he can fire. It works by recognising his palm print, rendering it impotent when it falls into a baddy’s hands. Like ma... Read more
This time they are hoping to produce the technologies for a 21st-century revolution in clean energy. IN THE 1970s researchers lounging on bean bags at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC... Read more
An ambitious project to map the brain is in the works. Possibly too ambitious NEWS of what protagonists hope will be America’s next big science project continues to dribble out. A leak to th... Read more
Archives could last for thousands of years when stored in DNA instead of magnetic tapes and hard drives LIKE all the best ideas, this one was born in a pub. Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of t... Read more
A research project considers how the law should deal with technologies that blur man and machine SPEAKING at a conference organised by The Economist earlier this year, Hugh Herr, a roboticis... Read more
Bacterial medicine is starting to emerge ONE of the crucial transitions of modern health care was from herbal to chemical medicine. Doctors had known for millennia that willow bark and poppy... Read more
A new manufacturing technique could help poor countries as well as rich ones EVERY summer, Seattle holds a raft race in Green Lake, a park that is the eponymous home of the water the rafts m... Read more
