It’s generally assumed that living for a very long time is a widely held desire. To help you in your quest for a long lifespan, data visualizer extraordinaire David McCandless made a clever chart showing the extent to which a number of habits and traits can extend your life expectancy, according to science:

As the “ultimate recipe” cheekily suggests, many of the things that either extend or reduce your life expectancy are out of your control. But it’s worth noting that many of the habits associated with longevity — eating well, exercising, having pets, maintaining friendships, having orgasms, drinking in moderation — are also habits that will improve your quality of life right now.

Plomin, one of the early pioneers of the twin and adoption studies that paved the way for current research linking genetics and human behavior, is an unabashed cheerleader for genetic intelligence testing. Hundreds of studies of twins and adoptive families have shown that intelligence is roughly 50 percent heritable, meaning that about half of the differences between people in cognitive ability are due to their genetic makeup. Despite talk of a “genetic test for intelligence,” polygenic scores aren’t themselves intelligence; they’re a statistical construct weakly associated with it.Nevertheless, once solid research linking specific genes to intelligence was published, it didn’t take long for personal genomics companies to develop consumer products around it.

For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. The surprise success now confirms that a cure for H.I.V. infection is possible, if difficult, researchers said.

Radioactive wastes from nuclear power generation might grip the imagination of a ‘worst waste’ since their harmful effects last thousands of years. “Radioactive wastes from nuclear power generation might grip the imagination of a ‘worst waste’ since their harmful effects last thousands of years. More than 30 years later, we have no permanent disposal repository planned or proposed for high-level nuclear waste in the U.S. (In 2010, Yucca Mountain was deemed not workable and we have no other candidate sites.)

In fact, there are patent applications still being prosecuted that claim priority back to Holmes’ 2003 submission. Holmes’ original patent application became a key part of the company’s mythology. Yet more than a decade after Holmes’ first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device.

Whereas no one is quite sure what the natural role of “healthy” amyloid beta is, tau is known to maintain protein filaments called microtubules inside nerve cells, which Fox calls “the railway tracks of the neurons’ transport system”. The consequences of aberrant amyloid beta and tau – formation of plaques and tangles in brain tissue – were seen by the German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer himself when he identified and studied this form of neurodegeneration in the 1900s. Some say that amyloid beta sets up the danger but tau sets it off: amyloid plaques build up around neurons in the brains of healthy people, but that’s only a problem if tangles caused by tau are present too.

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As the head of fermentation at Noma, Zilber, 33, coaxes new flavors out of jars whose contents are bubbling, rotting and pickling away to introduce at the cult-status Danish establishment (the restaurant was named best restaurant in the world four times, and was re-awarded two Michelin stars last week). So when Noma’s chef, Rene Redzepi, and Zilber published the Noma Guide to Fermentation last fall, it quickly became a modern edible bacteria bible. Across 100 recipes and nearly 500 pages, the guide covers Noma’s best experiments with seven types of fermentation – lactic acid, kombucha, vinegar, koji, miso, shoyu and garum – all of which make appearances on every dish at the restaurant.

The University of Illinois graduate student and his colleagues intentionally released mice onto New Zealand’s Saddle Island so they could study, in intricate detail, how invasions take place. To see how mice might overcome the Allee effect, MacKay’s team released the radio-collared mice onto Saddle Island, one pair at a time, over the course of a year. By comparing the introduced rodents’ behaviors to those of the island’s pre-eradication population, as well as those in the mainland population, the researchers were looking to discern whether mouse behavior is flexible enough to overcome the Allee effect.

It has been more than 65 years since James Watson and Francis Crick, working with Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins discovered that DNA – the basic chemical information code of all life forms – has a double helical structure that played an important role in its function. In a monumental achievement on this journey, scientists funded by NASA and led by the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in the US have synthesized a new stable version of DNA with eight base molecules, compared to the form containing four found on earth. This study is remarkable to me because it has proved that there is nothing particularly unique about the DNA found on Earth, and that there could be other stable forms in the universe that have different combinations of other molecules.