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News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it’s a step toward creating “designer babies.”

The idea of designer babies is that someday, scientists may insert particular genes into embryos to produce babies with desired traits like intelligence or athletic ability. Some people find that notion repugnant, saying it turns children into…

Study: With locked crust, Earth could become another Venus HOUSTON, May 12, 2008 — A new study of possible links between climate and geophysics on Earth and similar planets finds that prolonged heating of the atmosphere can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet’s crust to become locked in place.

Conventional wisdom holds that plate tectonics is both stable and self-correcting, but that view relies on the assumption that excess heat from the Earth's mantle can efficiently escape through the crust. The stress generated by flowing…

The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth’s skies for tens of millions of years.

Separate modelling work by Matija Cuk, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, suggests small, asteroid-sized objects a few tens of kilometres across would have lasted the longest as Trojan satellites. Cuk estimates…

Are you bald? Because men living in polluted areas are more likely to go bald than those breathing cleaner air, a new study suggests.

Nilofer Farjo, a hair transplant doctor involved in the research, added: “This may lead to new methods of treating genetic hair loss. The research suggests that environmental factors like smoking and air pollution contribute to hair loss…

Long dismissed as a product of overactive imaginations or a sign of mental illness, synesthesia has grudgingly come to be accepted by scientists in recent years as an actual phenomenon with a real neurological basis. Some researchers now believe it may yield valuable clues to how the brain is organized and how perception works.

Smilek and colleagues have identified two groups of synesthetes among those who associate letters and numbers with colors, he explained in a telephone interview. For individuals in one group, which Smilek calls “projector” synesthetes,…

A virtual guided tour of an orbit around the Earth.

Southern Canada is covered with a myriad of small lakes. If the sun is overhead, you can see the sun glint off the lakes, rivers, and streams—briefly lighting them up as the reflection point moves across the surface of the Earth with…

The world’s first exhibition of ‘extinct and impossible’ smells is under way, from the metallic fallout of the first atomic bomb to the aroma of cloves and oranges from first aid kit of a medieval plague doctor.

The aromatic exhibition has drawn on the efforts of perfumers, chemists, botanists and a Nasa scientist. “What we have created here is a world first, a scientific flight of fancy made up of exotic and strange scents,” says Robert…

Scientists are conducting experiments that reveal not only that humans are born with a range of innate skills, but that our prejudices are formed within the first few months of life Great philosophers have mused for millennia about human consciousness and how it makes sense of its surroundings. Like any good scientist, Spelke has

Welcome to Spelkeland, or, to give it its proper name, the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, run by the cognitive psychologist Prof Elizabeth Spelke, which is dedicated to understanding what…

…a discovery that sheds new light on why younger people are more creative. This adds to evidence that young animals are born with circuitry to make them explore the possibilities of their vocal apparatus and to make sense of the world. This idea that there are circuits in the brain that drive exploration is also exciting

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, report in the journal Science that immature and adult birdsongs are driven by two separate brain pathways, rather than one pathway that slowly matures, in work that offers…

Photos from space of our cities at night

In late 2002 and early 2003, astronaut Don Pettit, part of International Space Station Expedition 6, spent some time accumulating spare parts from around the space station, and constructed a device called a barn-door tracker. A barn-door…