A major difficulty in electric vehicle adoption is their battery capacity and range. One new study could help us potentially triple electric car range, hopefully supporting the global break from fossil fuels.The paper, published in the journal Joule, details how scientists added a compound made up of phosphorus […]
One of the biggest and most important science stories of the last few years will probably also be one of the biggest science stories of the next few years. So this is as good a time as any to get acquainted with the powerful new gene-editing technology known as CRISPR.
If you haven’t heard of CRISPR yet, the short explanation goes like this: In the past five years, scientists have figured out how to exploit a quirk in the immune systems of bacteria to edit genes in other organisms — plant genes, mouse genes, even human genes. With CRISPR, they can now make these edits quickly and cheaply, in days rather than weeks or months. (The technology is often known as CRISPR/Cas9, but we’ll stick with CRISPR, pronounced “crisper.”)
Let that sink in. We’re talking about a powerful new tool to control what genes get expressed in plants, animals, and even humans. The ability to delete undesirable traits and, potentially, add desirable traits with more precision than ever before.
In 2017 alone, researchers reported in Nature that they’d successfully used CRISPR in human embryos to fix a mutation that causes a terrible heart muscle disorder called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Other researchers have since called some of the conclusions into […]
The two wells drilled on Bryan Latkanich’s property are among 1,655 that have been hydraulically fractured in Washington County since 2004.
Credit: Anna Belle Peevey)
Most mornings, when his 7-year-old son Ryan gets up for school at 6:55, Bryan Latkanich is still awake from the night before, looking online for another home in some part of Pennsylvania with good schools and good water.
Six years ago, Latkanich signed on to let an energy company tap natural gas beneath his property by pumping water, sand and chemicals into rock formations, a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Soon after, Latkanich’s well water got a metallic taste, he developed stomach problems, and his son one day emerged from a bath covered in bleeding sores. More recently, Ryan became incontinent.
Testing by state regulators and a researcher at nearby Duquesne University showed the well water had deteriorated since gas extraction started but no proof of the cause. The state recently began another round of testing.
Latkanich is a single parent. He’s jobless and blind […]
Not satisfied with Republicans passing a tax bill that is hugely beneficial to them, the billionaire Koch brothers are planning to invest millions in an advertising campaign designed to sell the hugely unpopular bill to the American people.
The “full-scale, nationwide education campaign” will include TV and digital ads along with phone banking, door knocking, and town hall events, in the hopes that it will convince people of the bill’s supposed merits.
“We will make a massive push to show how pro-growth policies can revitalize the economy and open the floodgates to new opportunity, innovation, and prosperity,” a spokesman for the Koch network told Buzzfeed News. “There’s no doubt this was an historic achievement, but it was only the first step.”
The Koch brothers have already spent more than $20 million lobbying for the bill, working closely with the Trump administration.
Business leaders were quick to praise the bill’s passage, which more than half of Americans oppose, and have delivered a slew of promises signaling their commitment to “economic growth.” The CEO of Boeing announced his company was setting aside $300 million […]
Credit: Dave Wilner/Flickr
News fatigue in 2017 has been very real. It’s hard to keep track of the latest scandal, international humanitarian crisis, or crappy thing the government has done. So since it’s the holidays, here’s a little gift from Motherboard: a friendly reminder that repealing net neutrality wasn’t the only thing the government did this year to bring us closer to an internet dystopia. Republicans in Congress also made it legal again for internet service providers to collect your personal data and sell it to advertisers—without telling you a thing. Under President Barack Obama, the Federal Communications Commission approved a slate of sweeping privacy regulations that would have required ISPs to gain explicit consent from customers before sharing or selling their user data, including browsing history, social security numbers, and mobile location. This data is highly valuable to advertisers for providing targeted ads online, but would mean a wider array of companies would have access to some of your most private online information. These rules were supposed […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
