Johns Hopkins University engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.

The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to treat other hard-to-reach diseases, including cancer, less invasively and more precisely.

“With just a little pinprick, you insert a microrobot and do a procedure without infection or blood loss...

The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years.

The rock we live on will probably be long gone by then, but Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune might not make it either.

Traditional models assumed that the outer solar system would survive for billions of years before a passing star might disturb it...

Giardia duodenalis is a microscopic, flagellated parasite that often calls the human and animal gut its home. In most cases, it coexists harmlessly with its host, and most infected pets and people show no signs of illness. However, when it becomes pathogenic, it can cause diarrhea, digestive issues or weightloss.

Cats can carry a pathogenic version of the gut parasite that also infects humans, but how common is it among pet cats, and how often do they harbor such strains?

A recent study investigated these questions by analyzing stool test data from 157,616 pet cats across 49 U.S. states and five Canadian provinces between March 2022 and August 2023.

The results showed that 6.3% of the cats tested positive for Giardia duodenalis...

If you’ve delved into the worlds of “Star Trek,” “The Terminator” or William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer,” you’ll know that enhanced electronic vision is a staple of science fiction. Now, what was once futuristic fiction is becoming a reality.

Researchers have developed bionic eyes that can restore some lost vision. These devices’ capabilities are currently basic, but they have been steadily improving in recent years.

One day, they might even offer features that transcend the limits of natural human eyesight—for instance, by manipulating images in a way the human eye cannot or by seeing beyond the spectrum of visible light.

To date, implants have focused on combating problems with the retina, the light-sensing layer of cells insid...