Science & Technology

As science writer Matt Ridley reports, Leo James, William McEwan, and other researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have profoundly advanced the understanding of how antibodies work, opening the door to potential advances in how doctors treat infectious diseases. James summarizes his lab’s work on his web…

Sarah Murnaghan is a ten-year-old girl suffering from cystic fibrosis. If she does not get a lung transplant, she will die, likely within weeks. But so far she has been unable to receive a lung transplant because a federal agency—the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—has decided that children…

Dr. Jane Wright, a pioneer of chemotherapy—the medical treatment that uses drugs to destroy cancer cells—has died. Wright made her key discovery after observing the symptoms of patients, including her father, who were being treated for exposure to mustard gas during World War I.* These patients, she noticed, had low…

For decades in California, oil producers have successfully used hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract vast quantities of oil from the earth, and recent technological advances could unlock orders of magnitude more oil from California’s Monterey Shale. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the shale may hold 15.4 billion barrels…

From February 2010 to February 2013, onshore oil production (including the production of crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons called “lease condensate”) within the Lower 48 States increased by 64 percent, driven largely by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Seven states achieved particularly high increases: North Dakota, 198 percent; Texas,…

The themes of various horror films notwithstanding, “de-extinction”—the revival of extinct species—holds enormous promise for humans. The founders of Ark Corporation, Robert Lanza and George Church, plan to pursue de-extinction primarily as a means of improving the commercial breeding of farm animals and pets. Ark’s key technology involves “induced pluripotent…

Businessmen and researchers continue advancing the boundaries of 3D printing. Scott Summit, founder of Bespoke Innovations, asks us to “wonder what would happen if an industrial designer had a go at making prosthetic legs, things that are beautiful [and] . . . don’t neglect the esthetics.” Summit’s company makes fairings,…

This March, North Dakotans overcame brutal winter storms and produced a record 782,934 barrels of oil per day, a 35 percent increase over production last March. This increase was made possible largely by a 26 percent expansion in the number of wells, with 1,712 wells added over the year. What…

It is a parent’s nightmare: Your infant has severe breathing problems—intermittently ceasing to breathe and then breathing again—and there seems to be no way to fix the problem. This was a horror that April and Bryan Gionfriddo faced when their six-week-old son, Kaiba, temporarily quit breathing due to a collapsed…

Jared M. Rhoads reviews Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman.