The Pentagon's New Laser-Based Tool Uses Your Heartbeat to Track You. The government's hefty arsenal of surveillance tools just welcomed a powerful new member. Rather than monitoring an external device--a bug or a smartphone--or even the exterior features

Cancer-Killing Living Drug Is Made Safer With a Simple Off Switch. When it comes to battling cancer, our most powerful weapon is also our most dangerous. You've heard of CAR-T: the cellular immunotherapy extracts a patient's own immune cells, amps up thei

Alphabet Releases Its Master Plan for Toronto's New Smart City. Ever dreamed of living in a giant experiment? If so, Toronto may be the city for you. Sidewalk Labs has released blueprints for its proposed waterfront smart city and, depending who you ask,

Virtual Influencers Are on the Rise. How Far Will Their Influence Go? In early April 2019, something was suddenly very different about Kentucky Fried Chicken's Instagram account. In lieu of retro-style pictures of chicken, a decidedly 21st century Colonel

How the US Will Get to a 50 Percent Renewable Electric Economy by 2030. By 2030, more than 50 percent of the US economy will run on electricity derived from renewables. What are the implications as we shift the US and global energy economies away from fos

Could Lab-Grown Brains Develop Consciousness? There's a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains. If you, like many scientists, ...

Radical New DNA Microscope Reimagines the Cellular World. It's not every day that something from the 17th century gets radically reinvented. But this month, a team from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard took aim at one of the most iconic pieces of la

The LightSail-2 Mission Launched Last Week. It Could Shape the Future of Solar Spaceflight. Just like the early explorers harnessed the wind to sail around the world, scientists have long dreamed of using light to sail through the cosmos. Last week an amb

Can AI Save the Internet from Fake News? There's an old proverb that says "seeing is believing." But in the age of artificial intelligence, it's becoming increasingly difficult to take anything at face value--literally. The rise of so-called "...

The Biggest Offshore Wind Project in the US Is Underway. From the steady growth in market share of electric cars to continuous improvement and expansion of solar energy technology, it appears the world is going renewable--the age of fossil fuels is slowly