SKIRMISHER

Developments in a number of scientific disciplines suggest that we may soon be able to increase life expectancies from the 70- to 80-year range already seen in the richest countries to well over 100 and, perhaps, to over 1,000. We shall, in one sense, have made ourselves immortal.We shall not be immortal in the sense [...]

Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.
Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with [...]

Damn global warming just wouldn’t stop.
As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.

But then again, there would be enough reason to “create”  a [...]

Maybe intelligent life is so unimaginably different from us that we are looking in all the wrong “places.” Maybe really intelligent life forms hide their presence.So I changed my mind. I now take the null hypothesis very seriously: that Sagan and Shklovskii were wrong: that the number of advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy is [...]

Claudia Mitchell now feels through her artificial hand after a “pioneering operation” that rerouted nerves from her shoulder to connect to muscles in her chest area.
Four months after surgery, a patch of skin on her chest was able to feel touch, temperature and pain sensations as if they were coming from different parts of her [...]

Some of the worst mass extinctions found in the fossil record took place during climates very similar to the one in which we currently live. The York and Leeds researchers suggest that, based on predicted increases in temperatures over this century, Earth could see another mass extinction event as soon as a few generations from [...]

In 1951, 31-year-old Henrietta Lacks found blood on her underwear. She went to John Hopkins for a checkup, where she learned she had cervical cancer. Henrietta would die from the cancer in a few months, but tumor cells taken from her would not. In fact, those tumor cells would continue living and reproducing even in [...]

Naegleria fowleri, a killer amoeba living in lakes, enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Though infections tend to be found in Southern states, Naegleria lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.
Beach said people become [...]

From the July 22, 1961 issue of the Weekend Magazine:
What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you.
It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.
You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles [...]

One of the world’s 7,000 distinct languages disappears every 14 days, an extinction rate exceeding that of birds, mammals or plants, researchers said Tuesday. At least 20% of the world’s languages are in imminent danger of becoming extinct as their last speakers die off, compared with about 18% of mammals, 8% of plants and 5% [...]