The inventors headlines that matter, in one email every morning. Free.
Some of the best engineers and inventors are copycats. They look at how the natural world solves complex problems and use those mechanisms as the basis for innovations. But Mother Nature doesn't always give up her secrets easily.
SchoolBot.com hunts for retired schools worth saving and more — today's inventors signal.
SchoolBot.com finds and scores retired schools for community reuse.
Before the parasite Toxoplasma gondii can invade a cell, it has to know it has reached the right place. New research from the Whitehead Institute reveals that the parasite doesn't simply recognize a ready-made doorway into the cell. Instead, it helps create the conditions for its
Removing a single amino acid can determine whether new proteins assemble into stable complexes within mitochondria. An enzyme carries out this precise trimming at the start of mitochondrial proteins. Without it, numerous protein complexes lose their stability, according to a stud
We are continuously sending information to each other, transmitting zeros and ones through a giant network of connected computers and devices. Scientists are now trying to extend this familiar concept of the internet to the quantum realm, looking for an efficient way to exchange
A Husker research team's latest research could open the door to broader use of a class of materials whose electrical properties may someday power next-generation electronics, high-density energy storage, improved computer memory and new strategies for cooling.
Many liver and lung cancers arise in tissue that's already been scarred by chronic disease, such as hepatitis, cirrhosis or long-term lung damage. That scarring creates an environment that suppresses nearby immune cells, so by the time a tumor takes hold, it's often already shiel
For many years, antibiotics have been added to animal feed to help control harmful bacteria and improve growth. But amid concerns about antibiotic resistance—when bacteria adapt to survive treatments that would normally kill them—poultry producers are trying alternatives, includi
The atoms of the 5th element of the periodic table often find themselves in the company of each other, forming allotropes with a rich variety of structural motifs, each carrying a unique set of chemical and physical properties. Despite the long catalog, most boron allotropes do n
Researchers at the University of Chicago's Climate Impact Lab combined temperature forecasts with research on how heat affects death rates in more than 24,000 regions worldwide and found that the super El Niño could cause an estimated 451,000 additional heat-related deaths worldw
From coffee shops to customer service call centers, most people believe they have a good sense of how long a service will take. But new research from the University of Florida Warrington College of Business shows that customers often underestimate how much service times can vary,
A shipwreck off the coast of Turkey is the oldest shipwreck in the world, our team of archaeologists believes. There's little left of the ship itself, but based on clues from its cargo—including pottery vessels—a research team I was part of has tentatively dated the wreck to arou
Ever wonder what goes on inside the brain of a worm—how it processes information, responds to stimuli and perceives the world around it? Northeastern University researchers have opened up that can of worms, specifically the one containing C. elegans, a tiny roundworm that's one o
A new international study led by Lund University examines what happened to population levels after the Kikai-Akahoya volcanic eruption in prehistoric Japan. The results paint a more complex picture than what had previously been believed. The paper is published in the journal Scie
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.
Qubits, the quantum equivalent of digital bits, are fragile and prone to errors. That makes building reliable quantum computers extremely difficult. One fix has been to use traditional magic state distillation, which filters out flaws, but it is extremely resource-intensive.
When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?
When someone is badly injured, doctors urgently need two facts: the patient's blood type, so that a transfusion is safe, and their hematocrit, the share of the blood made up of red blood cells, which reveals blood loss or anemia. Hospitals measure both with large machines that ne
The ocean beneath Saturn's moon Enceladus lies under kilometers of ice, but some of its contents do reach the surface. Jets near the south pole spray out water vapor and icy particles, offering a way to investigate the hidden ocean without drilling down to it.
When scientists talk about scavengers, you might imagine an animal sniffing out or stumbling across a carcass, eating as much as possible and slinking away.
As human activity has increased temperatures globally, determining the costs directly incurred by climate change is challenging. The effects of climate change on extreme weather events—such as hurricanes and heat waves—can be locally specific and variable, and observations and cl
Astronomers using China's FAST radio telescope have discovered a compact cloud of hydrogen with no visible stars or galaxy around it. This could be one of the strongest candidates yet for an isolated "dark galaxy," containing nearly 500,000 times the sun's mass in neutral hydroge
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has exceeded expectations after engineers made incredibly tiny adjustments to sharpen its view of the universe. By moving a mirror just one-sixteenth the width of a human hair, the team helped bring its powerful instruments into near-perfe
