Lop off a newt’s leg or tail, and it will grow a new one. The creature’s cells can regenerate thanks to built-in time machines that revert cells to early versions of themselves in a process called dedifferentiation.

Ted Berger squints through a microscope at a slice of rat brain the size of an infant’s fingernail. It’s resting on an array of microelectrodes, which eavesdrop on the murmurs of nerve cells. Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, wants to understand the cells’ language because he is designing a computer […]

Bryant Linares has one heck of a secret family recipe: how to make world-class diamonds. Seven years ago his father, Robert, produced a diamond in a high-pressure chamber of carbon gas and dropped it into an acid solution to clean it off.

Contemplating the Eiffel Tower in 1895, Russian mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky got an idea. He imagined a huge tower anchoring a cable that reached up to a way- station parked in a geostationary orbit. People and materials could ascend the cable into space without rocket propulsion. As recently as 15 years ago, the idea of such […]

Comet is one of very few dogs worldwide to receive a stem-cell transplant for cancer treatment, rather than primarily for research. Cost of the therapy: $45,000.

Stanford law professor and free software advocate Lawrence Lessig called on the open source community to stand up and fight or risk being buried by patent-wielding legacy businesses with arsenals of powerful lawyers.

Put yourself in Mike Bolesta’s place. On the morning of Feb. 20, he buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher’s car. He pays the $114 installation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper.