Next year, I will be celebrating the big 4-0. It seems a little absurd. I feel barely any older than I did when I enjoyed my 20th birthday. I have hardly recovered from the ups and downs of adolescence, and...
CoulombFly, a prototype miniature solar-powered droneWei Shen, Jinzhe Peng and Mingjing Qi A drone weighing just 4 grams is the smallest solar-powered aerial vehicle to fly yet, thanks to its unusual electrostatic motor and tiny solar panels that produce extremely...
An inflammatory molecule (in green) is visible in liver tissue from an older mouseAnissa A. Widjaja et al. 2024 Blocking an inflammatory molecule known as interleukin-11 (IL-11) extends the lifespan of mice, suggesting that drugs inhibiting IL-11 may have anti-ageing...
When mixed with hydrogel, protein-based drugs can stay effective longer at high temperaturesShutterstock/Renko Aleks Many medications must be refrigerated or they lose their effectiveness, but a new method of packing protein-based drugs into a stiff gel could make them last...
Splitting hairs “Academics are often accused of ‘splitting hairs’,” David Taylor tells Feedback. “Well this year my team and I have done just that. We built a machine which can literally split a single hair from end to end. This...
The last summer Olympics, in Tokyo, were the hottest on record. The Paris games, kicking off next week, could be hotter. With wide boulevards, busy roads and zinc-topped roofs, Paris is a heat island. Daytime high temperatures have routinely topped...
Matt Crossick Media Assignments/PA Images/Alamy Rowan Hooper: Your latest book is Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world. What is this world? Naomi Klein: The mirror world is the term I use to describe the land of conspiracies, and the...
Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Shutterstock It is by now well established that to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, we need to reach net-zero carbon emissions as fast as possible. That means getting more of our energy from renewable sources and finding...
A black-necked spitting cobra, which are mostly in sub-Saharan AfricaLuca Boldrini (CC BY-SA) A commonly used blood thinner could prevent hundreds of thousands of people from needing amputations after a cobra bite. Snakebites kill up to 138,000 people each year,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX6UeH3W18k Jellyfish-shaped robots made of magnetic ferrofluid can be controlled by light through an underwater obstacle course. Swarms of these soft robots could be useful for delivering chemicals throughout a liquid mixture or moving fluids through a lab-on-a-chip. Ferrofluid droplets...
