When researchers used to try to diagnose and treat diseases, they would often search for one mutation on a single gene that was causing the problem. Or maybe they would look for average effects of a mutation that led to a disease across the entire population. But these approaches ignored the complexities and specifics that…

If doctors knew which trauma survivors would develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, when the patients arrived at the emergency room, they could prevent it from occurring in the first place. Sisi Ma, a research scientist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, presented her work trying to do just that at the Leveraging Big…

Once you suck smog out of the air, what should you do with it? Pollution particles are mostly made up of carbon, so Dutch Artist Daan Roosegaarde decided to compress them into jewelry in a nod to diamond, carbon’s sparkliest allotrope. The device extracting this pollution powder is Studio Roosegaarde’s Smog Free Tower, a 23-foot-tall…

Expedition 44 launched from Kazakhstan around 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday and arrived at the International Space Station at 10:45 p.m. ET. It takes more time to get from New York City to LA than it does to get to space. Unbelievable. Astronauts Kjell Lindgren of NASA, Oleg Kononenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency,…

#CRISPRfacts – & head-nod to @BabyAttachMode http://t.co/SxTUvzVJz2— Andrew Maynard (@2020science) July 22, 2015 The gene editing technique CRISPR was launched from relative public obscurity to the mainstream today when #CRISPRfacts began trending on Twitter, quieting some of the hype surrounding a Wired story. CRISPR does hold a lot of promise. Unlike previous gene editing techniques,…

President Obama greets Alice Wong, Disability Visibility Project Founder, via robot before a White House reception to mark the 25th anniversary of the Americans Disabilities Act. A photo posted by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Jul 20, 2015 at 5:58pm PDT Alice Wong was President Barack Obama’s first telerobotic visitor when she maneuvered her robot to…

No images were more captivating this week than those released from our reconnaissance of the last great world in our solar system, Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft completed its nearly decade-long journey to the dwarf planet, cruised past it at 35,000 miles per hour, and will beam its images and data back to earth over…

I had sporadically seen mysterious nitrogen canisters on New York City sidewalks, and wondered what they were doing there. Each tank has a hose snaking its way into a manhole, where it presumably dispenses nitrogen under the street. Luckily, Popular Science let me find out as part of my job (booyah). It turns out they’re…

Garbage cans are the latest previously un-smart objects to become Wi-Fi-enabled. Waste management company Bigbelly equipped two of its smart bins with wireless internet in downtown Manhattan last winter, providing 50 to 75 megabits per second. That’s fast enough to download an HD movie in nine minutes, or upload 200 photos in about 27 seconds.…

A new technique for growing diamonds in a lab can produce gems that are almost identical to their natural counterparts. These synthetic diamonds are 30 to 40 percent cheaper, and can be produced in a matter of months. They’re so indistinguishable to the naked eye that thediamond industry is in an arms race to produce…