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By Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib of Nature magazineLike the computer chips made by Intel, the company that Moore co-founded, the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) exploits semiconductor technology, with its ability to deliver ever-increasing speed and lower costs–a trend predicted by ‘Moore’s law’ some 50 years ago. When Ion Torrent of Guilford, Connecticut, part of Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California, introduced the device late last year, some scientists wondered whether it could live up to its promise to put a sequencer within the reach of any reasonably funded lab....

Apple’s new iPad will soon have a companion on store shelves, according to reports.(Credit:Josh Lowensohn/CNET)Apple’s iPad Mini will come with a design that bests the company’s current slate, according to an analyst.“Apple did not skimp on the aesthetics of the much anticipated iPad Mini,” Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White said recently in a research note obtained by All Things Digital. “In fact, we believe the iPad Mini could outshine the new iPad in terms of how the device feels in a consumer’s hands....

Photographer and activist István Kósa hopes that lessons from Romania’s past guide its future. Six decades ago, Romanians were promised economic prosperity as their country was industrialized, but in most cases, they were left with little more than “collapsed buildings, poisoned soils and disoriented communities," Kosa said. For this photo essay, Kósa, a Hungarian photographer and former project manager for a Romanian environmental group, traveled throughout the country, capturing the social and economic consequences of its pollution legacy....

An analysis of four icy bodies discovered in the outer Solar System reveals no sign that they are being influenced by a large, unseen planet lurking beyond Neptune. The finding chips away at a line of evidence for a ‘Planet Nine’ proposed in 2014 on the basis of the clustering of objects in a region called the Kuiper belt, argues a team of astronomers in a paper first posted on the arXiv preprint server on June 16....

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Defense suddenly faced the catastrophic prospect of forfeiting crucial defense technology to a rival when a military aircraft—packed with highly classified systems—vanished in the South China Sea. The disappearance of the single-engine stealth jet, an F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, triggered a major search-and-recovery effort by a little-known Navy organization that specializes in ocean retrieval. The mission was a high-stakes race to save a Pentagon crown jewel from the extreme depths, with their frigid temperatures and crushing pressure....

At first the computer game looks awfully easy for an eight-year-old–like something out of the Stone Age of arcades in the 1980s. A red triangle “arrow” appears on the monitor’s blue screen, and then the nose of a cartoon airplane glides into view from the left. If the arrow points upward, Ben must make the plane climb. When he succeeds, a spiky yellow sun beams. A second glance shows that all is not as it seems....

US President Donald Trump released a revised budget plan on May 23 that would slash science spending across the federal government in 2018. Biomedical, public-health and environmental research programs are among those that would be pared back. Those cuts, along with deep reductions in programs for the poor, are balanced by a proposed 10% increase in military spending. That echoes the “skinny budget” outline that Trump released in March, which faced opposition in Congress....

When historians chronicle the stem cell research wars, Shinya Yamanaka will likely go down as a peacemaker. The Japanese scientist has helped send the field on a surprising end run around the moral debate surrounding embryonic stem cells, the creation of which requires the destruction of embryos. Last year Yamanaka led one of two teams that showed that normal human skin cells can be genetically reprogrammed into the equivalent of stem cells....

Practice makes perfect, but how? Two groups of neuroscientists using MRI brain imaging announced last month that they were able to see changes inside the brains of people after mastering a new skill. The big surprise is that the part of the brain that changed has no neurons or synapses in it! The cerebral remodeling during learning was seen in the mysterious and still largely unexplored “white matter” region of the brain....

It’s easy to recall events of decades past—birthdays, high school graduations, visits to Grandma—yet who can remember being a baby? Researchers have tried for more than a century to identify the cause of “infantile amnesia.” Sigmund Freud blamed it on repression of early sexual experiences, an idea that has been discredited. More recently, researchers have attributed it to a child’s lack of self-perception, language or other mental equipment required to encode memories....

The nuclear problem with Iran started 70 years ago in the desert of New Mexico. July 16, 1945, was a day with two dawns: the latter powered by hydrogen atoms fusing at a comfortable remove of 150 million kilometers. The earlier one entailed a blinding flash of white light fading away as the Trinity test of an atomic bomb exploded at 5:29 A.M. local time—“Up n’ atom,” as the slogan for kids went from a little later in the new Atomic Age....

The majority of the planet’s fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if the world wants even half a chance—literally—at meeting its most ambitious climate targets. A new study published yesterday in the journal Nature found that 60 percent of oil and natural gas, and a whopping 90 percent of coal, must remain unextracted and unused between now and 2050 in order for the world to have at least a 50 percent shot at limiting warming to 1....

The fat is in the fire. According to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, the expression refers to when “something has been said or done that will cause a lot of trouble.” The saying goes way back: it’s included in British writer John Heywood’s collection of proverbs published in 1546. The adage’s original, more literal meaning came from the kitchen danger resulting when globules of fat fell into the fire and accelerated the flame to a possibly out-of-control degree....

By Zoe CorbynA common assumption is that rising global temperatures will increase the spread of malaria – the deadly mosquito-borne disease that affects millions of people worldwide. But a study out today in Biology Letters finds that warmer temperatures seem to slow transmission of malaria-causing parasites, by reducing their infectiousness.The study was done with rodent malaria, but the researchers, at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, expect the pattern to apply to human malaria and possibly to other mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever and West Nile virus....

One early morning in June of 1986, I waded into a shallow tide pool on Long Island, squatted on a plastic milk crate and dropped an empty snail shell into the water. In a few minutes a small hermit crab skittered toward the shell, probed the opening with its claws to measure the size of the interior space and rotated the spiral casing several times to look for holes. Almost quicker than I could follow, the crab pulled itself out of its old refuge and thrust its vulnerable abdomen into the snail shell I had dropped....

CHINCOTEAGUE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Va. – A sign at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service visitor center here states a simple motto: “Where Wildlife Comes First.” But many visitors never see the sign, or much wildlife. Cars stream past the center on hot summer days, headed for a mile-long public beach at the refuge’s southern end. The prime goals are sand, surf, and a parking spot close to the water....

The night sky is a field of stars. In every direction, stars bright and dim fill the horizon to brimming. Some seem to form distinct patterns, which we recognize as constellations. Yet as beguiling as those patterns may be, most of them are no more than projections of the human mind. The vast majority of stars, in our own galaxy and in others, have no true physical connection to one another....

WASHINGTON, D.C.—At the inaugural summit of ARPA–E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, no less an august personage than Norman Augustine declared that we were possibly witnessing an inflection point—a turn from old thinking to new. As an aerospace business pioneer, Augustine certainly knows when trajectories change and escape velocities are attained. Indeed, a host of speakers regarded ARPA–E’s effort as an Apollo project, a Manhattan project, and Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, even called for ARPA–E to be part of a potential Marshall Plan for energy—a road map to a future of clean power, complete with the Hoover Dam of solar, or the like....

Bacteria have been engineered to manufacture anti-cancer drugs and self-destruct to spill this cargo deep inside tumours. In combination with chemotherapy, the approach shrank a tumour in a mouse model for liver cancer more than chemotherapy alone. To create the cancer therapy, University of California, San Diego scientists turned to Salmonella as this bacterium likes to colonise tumours as a way of hiding from the body’s immune system. The bacterium was engineered to produce the toxin haemolysin, along with a chemokine to call in the host’s own defences....

Japan and Australia are expanding their support for hydrogen fuel technology. Hydrogen-powered automobiles will be featured at the annual Tokyo Motor Show that begins in a week. They were also featured prominently during the Group of 20 environment ministerial held in the resort community of Karuizawa. And they’ll likely be featured when the G-20 foreign ministers gather in Nagoya late next month. Experts see positive signs for hydrogen technology investments in Asia and beyond, as governments and the private sector seek ways to lower transportation emissions....