Electronic pill can relay diagnostic information or release drugs in response to smartphone commands. Researchers at MIT, Draper, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed an ingestible capsule that can be controlled using Bluetooth wireless technology. The capsule, which can be customized to deliver drugs, sense environmental conditions, or both, can reside in the stomach for at least a month, transmitting information and responding to instructions from a user’s smartphone.

The capsules, manufactured using 3D-printing technology, could be deployed to deliver drugs to treat a variety of diseases, partic...

Astronomers have cataloged nearly 4,000 exoplanets in orbit around distant stars. Though the discovery of these newfound worlds has taught us much, there is still a great deal we do not know about the birth of planets and the precise cosmic recipes that spawn the wide array of planetary bodies we have already uncovered, including hot Jupiters, massive rocky worlds, icy dwarf planets, and – hopefully someday soon – distant analogs of Earth.

To help answer these and other intriguing questions, a team of astronomers has conducted ALMA’s first large-scale, high-resolution survey of protoplanetary disks, the belts of dust and gas around young stars.

Known as the Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP), this “Large Program” of the Atacama Large Millimeter/su...

UniSA research digs up the fat-fighting power of clays. It costs the global economy an estimated US$2 trillion annually and has been dubbed a modern day health epidemic, but new research from the University of South Australia has unearthed a possible cure for obesity – and it is as plain as dirt!

Investigating how clay materials can improve drug delivery, UniSA researcher and PhD candidate, Tahnee Dening serendipitously discovered that the clay materials she was using had a unique ability to “soak up” fat droplets in the gut.

Dening says this accidental discovery could potentially be a cure for obesity...

The effects of a supernova – and possibly more than one – on large ocean life like school-bus-sized Megalodon 2.6 million years ago are detailed in a new article. About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.

The effects of such a supernova – and possibly more than ...