Back in the 1960s, government scientists thought it was a good idea to make artificial hearts powered by the radioactive element plutonium-238. This isotope of plutonium is the same one that NASA has used to power its space instruments — all the way from the experiments for the Apollo missions to Pluto’s probe, New Horizons.…

Diet crazes come and go, but the science of how to eat healthy hasn’t actually changed that much in recent years. We hear a lot of conflicting advice on whether the latest diet is better than the last, yet there’s at least one sentence that nutrition experts agree on. It’s from the scientific report of…

A landslide just outside of Los Angeles caused Vasquez Canyon Road to buckle and break last week. By the time the land stopped shifting, the road looked more like a rollercoaster. READ MORE

Cyborg roses could become the first “smart” plant. Scientists at Linköping University in Sweden created the first electronic rose in a lab, theyreported Nov. 20 in the journal Science Advances. This technology could create plants that light up to signal what they need, though the researchers admit that’s a bit far off. READ MORE

Paper calendars were due for an update. The Hungarian design studio Anagraphic has created a beautiful way to visualize all of the celestial information that the traditional boxes just can’t accommodate. Ok, so it’s not as simple as your average wall calendar. But this year’s version — a new take on the first one made in 2009…

The Ebola outbreak that infected 28,000 people, killed 11,000, andis not quite over today has been devastating, but it also revealed something troubling: The global health system is broken. By the time the world responded to the Ebola crisis, it was too late to contain it, and thousands of deaths occurred that experts say could…