His unusual hobby started couple of years ago, when Oswalt came across a story about Taylor Wilson, a 14-year-old who built his own nuclear fusion reactor in his garage in Reno, Nevada, in 2008, making him the youngest person to ever achieve nuclear fusion. Oswalt’s results were verified by members of a forum called Fusor.net that included physicists and hobbyists alike, making him the youngest person to ever build a working nuclear fusion reactor. Image: Jackson Oswalt

Oswalt decided to take on the challenge anyway, starting with research on what it takes to build a nuclear fusion reactor—the parts, what tools he would need, and how long it would take.

The battle, pitting drug companies against doctors and patient advocates, is being fought over the unlikeliest of substances: human excrement. The therapy transfers fecal matter from healthy donors into the bowels of ailing patients, restoring the beneficial works of the community of gut microbes that have been decimated by antibiotics. At the heart of the controversy is a question of classification: Are the fecal microbiota that cure C. diff a drug, or are they more akin to organs, tissues and blood products that are transferred from the healthy to treat the sick?

But glaring inconsistencies in the standard methods used to test for date rape drugs in hospitals and labs across America meant Kendall, like many other victims, would never learn what made her pass out that night — or what happened to her while she lay unconscious. A BuzzFeed News investigation has exposed gaping irregularities in date rape drug testing procedures at hospitals and state crime labs all over the country — subjecting victims to what the head of the FBI toxicology lab recently described as a game of “roulette.” And some labs rely entirely on a type of drug screen so notoriously fallible that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recommends that it never be used in drug-facilitated sexual assault cases — noting that “false negative results” caused by its “insufficiently sensitive methods” risk bringing investigations to a premature end.

Not only did the book pave the way for other natural philosophers (the word “scientist” wasn’t coined until 1834), it inspired an entirely new genre of writing: popular science. Researchers Johanthan Topham and Simon Burrows even created a database for 18th-century Swiss publisher Société Typographique de Neuchatel that reveals tens of thousands of popular science books written in French that were purchased across Europe—everywhere from the United Kingdom to Russia. In addition to Fontenelle, other science writers of the Enlightenment era include Émilie du Châtelet (who translated Newton’s work into French), chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (who created a system to identify chemicals) and Nicolas de Condorcet (who argued for the use of scientific reasoning in democratic governance).

The tube-like structures embedded within the rock.Image: A. El Albani and A. Mazurier/IC2MP CNRS – Université de Poitiers
The reported discovery of 2.1-billion-year-old fossilized track marks etched in sedimentary rock is pushing back the earliest evidence of self-propelled movement by an organism on Earth by a whopping 1.5 billion years. New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests ancient life on Earth had acquired the capacity for self-propelled locomotion at least 2.1 billion years ago, and not 570 million years ago as previous research suggested. Image: A. El Albani and A. Mazurier/IC2MP CNRS – Université de Poitiers
Back in 2010, the lead author of the new study, Abderrazak El Albani from CNRS-Université de Poitiers, discovered the earliest evidence of complex multicellular life at the Francevillian Basin in the Haut-Ogooué Province of Gabon in central Africa.

Late Tuesday night, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent their final data uplink to the Opportunity rover on Mars. And yet from that moment on, Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit, began plugging along the surface of Mars. When the dust storm originally engulfed Opportunity last year, mission scientists were hopeful they might yet recover the rover.

In 2017, the World Health Organisation (WHO) surveyed 77 countries and found that 81 per cent had detected gonorrhoea strains resistant to azithromycin, and two-thirds had strains resistant to one or both of the two ‘last resort’ antibiotics. That means there’s little point in just rolling out a new antibiotic like zoliflodacin on its own – gonorrhoea has already developed resistance to penicillin, spectinomycin, tetracycline and now ceftriaxone and azithromycin too. Bacterial cultures can help confirm that an infection actually is gonorrhoea, while sophisticated molecular tests or DNA sequencing can identify whether the bacteria is vulnerable to the usual antibiotics, or whether new ones will have to be used.

In Cascadia, for example, slow slip events registering as magnitude 6.0 quakes can last two or three weeks and can repeat every 15 months, on average. There is a chance that slow slip events are driven by strange mechanical properties of fault material that we simply don’t yet understand. The International Ocean Discovery Program has also drilled into the subduction zone there to directly sample the sediments involved with these slow slip events, while also sending seismic waves through the region to better map out the fault networks there.

Beaton and her colleagues have launched a trial to try to disrupt the progression from strep infection to heart disease. By the time people in Uganda get a diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease, Beaton says, 85% are in a severe condition. Overall, the trial has screened the hearts of more than 102,000 schoolchildren, reaching its goal of finding 916 kids with early-stage rheumatic heart disease who can be enrolled into the next stage, being randomly assigned into one of two groups.

The objection to this theory is that ape tickle-play vocalisations don’t sound like human laughter at all – they are more like heavy breathing, with inhalations and exhalations equally audible. By contrast, when humans meet up on social occasions, the most frequent sounds you’re likely to hear are not grunts and screams but ripples of laughter. This has become so habitual that our instinctive social signals, inherited from our primate ancestors, have been largely repurposed: the tense primate fear-grin has given way to the relaxed human smile, while the angry mobbing cry has transformed into uproarious laughter.