When Omega Eggs (eggs containing Omega fatty acids) first appeared on the mass market in the early 2000s I had this bizarre image in my head of a semi-crazed scientist extracting the yolk with a giant syringe, swirling it about in a beaker with a neon blue solution to extract the bad fat, injecting it [...]

If you take a small sample of animal tissue and encourage it to grow in vitro, separate from the original animal’s body, it is possible to create an edible piece of meat. Culturing living tissue is a routine lab procedure and an important part of medical and biological research, but using the tools and techniques [...]

With relevance to homegrown, lone operator terrorist threats highlighted by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a series of initiatives Wednesday aimed at defending the U.S. against increasingly ambiguous threats. Whereas its core mission will remain the same—researching new types of technology for the military—the cutting-edge agency [...]

More than 382,000 people with kidney disease in the U.S. are on dialysis, a painful procedure that can wreak havoc on blood vessels due to constant jabs from large needles. During dialysis, a patient’s blood is filtered out of their body and through a machine that performs the work normally done by the kidneys. Patients [...]

In 2009, researchers from the biotechnology company Oxitec released over 18,000 genetically modified mosquitoes in a bid to reduce the wild mosquito population. The mosquitoes were designed so that in theory, when these modified male mosquitoes mate with wild females, the offspring would be infertile. Release enough mosquitoes and you could crash the native population. [...]

Most articles in the journal Nature Biotechnology have titles like “Selective Enrichment of Newly Synthesized Proteins for Quantitative Secretome Analysis.” They don’t usually contain sentences like this: “The special-purpose vehicle’s capital structure, priority of payments and various coverage tests and credit enhancements are collectively known as the ‘cash flow waterfall’—a reference to the manner in [...]