An ultra-fast tiny laser can work as a miniature scalpel inside the body, making careful incisions or excisions while leaving healthy tissue intact. It is more effective than a doctor's metal scalpel or even other laser devices, according to its developers at the University of Texas, because it leaves more healthy cells alone. Read More >

John Amory, a doctor at the University of Washington, has been developing a male contraceptive for 15 years. Turns out, it's harder than it sounds. We spoke with him to find out why. Read More >

Since 1990, doctors have been regularly treating cancer patients using proton beams, which work similarly to radiation. Proton therapy is more precise, however, causing less harm to healthy surrounding tissues. Unfortunately, generating a proton beam requires a particle-accelerator facility that's the size of an airplane hangar and costs more than £60 million to build. Thus, proton-beam therapy remains a rarity, with only 37 working facilities worldwide. Just 10,000 people were treated last year, less than 5 percent of suitable patients. Read More >

When you check in to a hospital in the future, along with checking your vitals and ordering a blood panel, your doctors may assign you a personal mouse. The immune-deficient creature will receive a transplant of your tissue, which will allow it to mimic your immune system, or maybe your specific type of cancer. Then doctors can try out a cocktail of drugs or gene therapies to see what might work on you. Read More >

Today in grandiose space ambitions that would make even Richard Branson balk: a £40 billion, 1,000-mile long, 12-mile high, 20,000-miles-per-hour maglev train that starts on the ground and arrives in low Earth orbit. The minds behind the Startram project think it could reduce the cost per kilo for cargo from roughly £6,500 to just £32. Read More >

Orbital debris is a large and growing problem, and no one is quite sure how to deal with it -- polar lasers, nets and other concepts are still merely ideas. But we should at least monitor all that space trash, to be certain where it is and whether it's heading for something we want to protect, like the ISS or a military satellite. The US Air Force's new Space Fence, designed to keep an eye on space trash, is getting closer to reality. Read More >

Ohio State University researchers have captured the first-ever images of atoms moving within a molecule using a novel technique that turns one of the molecules own electrons into a kind of flash bulb. The technique has yielded a new way of imaging molecules, but could one day help scientists to intimately control chemical reactions at the atomic scale. Read More >

Maybe, but it's going to take a long time. For the past 200,000 years or so, fatty and sugary foods were hard for humans to come by and well worth gorging on. Fats help maintain body temperature, sugars provide energy, and craving such food is hardwired: Eating fats and sugars activates reward centers in the brain. Read More >

Yes. Marc Levine, the chief of gastrointestinal radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, USA, has found that a competitive eater's stomach works more like an expanding balloon than a squeezing sac. Read More >

Yes, but no more than listening to Justin Bieber. The misconception that there's something unique about Mozart's ability to increase brainpower began in 1993, with a paper in Nature. Neurobiologists Gordon Shaw, Frances Rauscher and Katherine Ky of the University of California at Irvine found that students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata demonstrated a temporary increase in spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by an IQ test. Read More >