Some areas on Mars are extremely salty, very cold, and have only a hint of oxygen - just like Earth. Yet even in the permafrost of Lost Hammer Spring in the Nunavut territory of Canada’s High Arctic, researchers have found microbes that have never been identified before. 

Using genomic and single cell microbiology methods, they examined their metabolisms and found that the microbial communities found living in Canada’s High Arctic can survive by eating and breathing simple inorganic compounds of a kind that have been detected on Mars - methane, sulfide, sulfate, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. 

Happy the elephant’s story is a sad one. She is currently a resident of the Bronx Zoo in the US, where the Nonhuman Rights Project (a civil rights organization) claims she is subject to unlawful detention. The campaigners sought a writ of habeas corpus on Happy’s behalf to request that she be transferred to an elephant sanctuary.

Historically, this ancient right which offers recourse to someone being detained illegally had been limited to humans. A New York court previously decided that it excluded non-human animals. So if the courts wanted to find in Happy’s favor, they would first have to agree that she was legally a person.

Since E.E. “Doc” Smith’s 1934 novel, Triplanetary, people have dreamed about performing the first space dive. As we make our first steps toward commercialising space travel, many people have started to wonder if we are any closer to achieving the first space dive. 

The value of bees in pollination is overstated, outside the on-demand almond grower market the pollination done by bees would be taken up by 400,000 other species if bees disappeared tomorrow, but that doesn't mean they are not an important part of the ecosystem in other ways.

This was potentially a good article by the BBC except that sadly it used an absurd click bait title and had several serious factual errors

Time crystals are quantum systems whose lowest energy-state is where its particles are in constant motion.

One of the sillier commercials for a cell phone I have seen in recent memory is some guy shaking his head in sadness that his phone is out of battery and a kindly person places her phone on his to give him a boost. They were able to use the Qi wireless charging capability to share energy with each other.

This looked like a solution without a problem. If you are going to be that despondent without your phone, you bring one of those little charging packs, you bring a power cord, you are not shaking your head like you unwittingly got placed into an episode of "Alone" and have been dropped into Alaska with nothing but a neck gaiter and a frying pan. You are prepared.

Genetic admixture didn't begin in the 1970s, when insulin became the first government approved genetically modified organism (GMO) and AquAdvantage salmon, where an Atlantic salmon expresses a natural gene from a Chinook salmon to grow faster, certainly was not the first time such genetic engineering showed benefits across the ecosystem.

A new study finds that genetic admixture occurred in polar bears 100,000 years, but it did not create Frankenbears, it just created better brown bears. 

Some politicians and cultural activists may claim that humans are propelled by consumerism but a new paper finds that isn't true. And that it is not true is a good thing.

If we were all driven by greed, there would be no poverty. Developing nations would embrace science and have plentiful food. But the environmental strain would be tremendous.

In 1347, the Bubonic or Black Plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea.

The disease tore through Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa, in some cases claiming up to 60 percent of the population. It resurged throughout the next 500 years.