The Scandinavian nation of Sweden has set a new precedent in the world of recycling its trash, with a near zero waste amount of 99 percent. Sweden was already ahead of the game back in 2012, when they were recycling 96 percent of their trash, but the three percent jump in just two years is... Continue Reading →

If giving money to panhandlers makes you queasy but refusing them makes you feel like Ebeneezer Scrooge, one California city thinks it has a solution for you. There are now 14 bright orange parking meters scattered around Pasadena that will collect money for organizations that help the homeless, the Los Angeles Times reports. The goal... Continue Reading →

A 16-year-old from India has designed a device that converts breath into speech. High-school student Arsh Shah Dilbagi invented TALK as a portable and affordable way to aid people suffering from ALS, locked-in syndrome, and anyone else speech-impaired or paralyzed. Prototyped using a basic $25 Arduino microcontroller, Dilbagi’s invention costs only $80, or about a... Continue Reading →

Researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute have developed a spleen-inspired device capable of rapidly filtering out pathogenic organisms and deadly toxins from the blood of patients. It’s hoped that one day, this blood-cleansing tool could be used to help individuals suffering from a life-threatening condition called sepsis. Sepsis is the immune system’s overreaction to a bloodstream... Continue Reading →

Single Americans make up more than half of the adult population for the first time since the government began compiling such statistics in 1976. Some 124.6 million Americans were single in August, 50.2 percent of those who were 16 years or older, according to data used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its monthly... Continue Reading →

Seeing in the dark could soon be as easy as popping a pill or squeezing some drops into your eyes, thanks to some new science, an unusual deep-sea fish, and a plant pigment. In the 1990s, marine biologist Ron Douglas of City University London discovered that, unlike other deep-sea fish, the dragonfish Malacosteus niger can... Continue Reading →

Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, with 7,669 people per square kilometre, which means they don’t have a lot of space lying around on which to grow food. Because of this, they import 90 percent of their food from elsewhere around the globe, sometimes from places as far away as... Continue Reading →

Extinct squirrel-like creatures from China suggest the earliest mammals originated more than 200 million years ago, much earlier than often previously thought, researchers say. The fossils were discovered in the last three years by private collectors and amateur paleontologists in a Liaoning province cornfield in northeastern China. Liaoning has become famous for the trove of... Continue Reading →

Urine is pretty amazing stuff: It can power everything from personal generators to plasma thrusters in space. But the power of pee isn’t limited to generating energy; new research proves that we can actually make human brain cells from urine. Scientists in China have begun experimenting with neurons that have been converted from cells present... Continue Reading →

British and Japanese scientists have managed to "reset" human stem cells to their earliest state, opening up a new realm of research into the start of human development and potentially life-saving regenerative medicines. In work described by one independent expert as "a major step forward", the scientists said they had successfully rebooted pluripotent stem cells... Continue Reading →