…has advanced in monkey trials. A monkey at the University of Pittsburgh, outfitted with a child-sized robotic arm controlled directly by its own brain signals, can feed itself chunks of fruits and vegetables. Sounds very promising…

It’s still too early to say for certain, but at least one scientist thinks there’s a strong possibility that the apparent methane in Mars’s atmosphere must be coming from life in the soil. The debate continues.

Contact lenses you wear overnight to temporarily correct nearsightedness the next day? The technology is here–but I doubt it will do the trick on my abysmal optical orbs. Good news for the more run-of-the-mill contact wearer, though.

I don’t care.

A Cambridge geneticist thinks so; he believes we have a 50-50 chance of being able to achieve a 1,000-year lifespan within 25 years. Let’s see…25, plus my current age…um…y’think we could maybe move on that a little faster?

It’s probably just my sick and twisted mind that reads this good-news medical story about an infusion of young blood helping old mice, and immediately thinks, “Vampires!”

A five-pound, hand-held medical diagnostic device developed by Sandia researchers can detect heart and gum disease instantly. Attach a modified salt shaker to it* and you’ll really have something. *Extremely geeky Star Trek reference.

The first critical elements of a giant neutrino telescope have been successfully installed in a 1.5-mile deep hole in Antarctica: When completed, the telescope will utilize a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice as a detector, and will be capable of capturing information-laden, high-energy particles from some of the most distant and violent events in the …

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A fingerprint found on The Adoration of the Christ Child may prove it’s the work of Leonardo da Vinci, once and for all. The art minor I once was loves this kind of stuff.

…but the idea of a spinning 100-kilometre-long “fishing line” that hooks onto satellites and flings them to higher orbits is still cool. And unlike the space elevator, we have the technology to make one within five to 10 years.

Is laughter really the best medicine–or has Reader’s Digest been lying to us all these years? Inquiring minds want to know, and so this week I set out to see what recent research into the place of humor in human mental and physical health I might be able to turn up. It looks like Reader’s …

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Margaret Atwood answers this and other pressing questions surrounding her much-talked-about (and occasionally ridiculed) remote book-signing device.