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Your DNA is under attack. Throughout the day, radiation, carcinogenic substances, and other malevolent forces wreak havoc on the genetic code inside your cells. Yet our DNA is amazingly resilent, thanks to molecular systems that monitor and repair DNA when it gets busted up, and today three scientists took home the 2015 Chemistry Nobel Prize for discovering those mechanisms.Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in the U....

Astrophysicists have detected the first signs of cold water vapor in the outer reaches of a baby star system. The discovery, announced today in Science, not only fills a gap in the convoluted question of how planets form, but also hints where the water that covers Earth-like planets is stored until the rocky bodies can receive and hold onto it as oceans.The short version of how scientists believe the Earth formed goes like this: Roughly 4....

Media Platforms Design TeamHome brewers get a passing, yet honorable, mention in the book. Have they shaped the beer industry or has the beer industry shaped them?They’ve certainly come a long way. When I was research manager for Bass we knew that the secret was in the yeastliquid over powder, the right kind, quality, and so on. So we developed a home brew kit with great yeastand the beer was so good....

Media Platforms Design TeamThey were trying to treat brain cancer. But, in a happy accident, a group of brain cancer researchers at Duke University invented a better and perhaps greener way to make nylon, as described in Nature Chemical Biology.A brief history lesson: In the 1930s, American chemical companies scrambled to develop synthetic fibers to replace the natural ones shipped from Asia and South America (which they couldn’t get anymore because of a trade dispute)....

April 10, 2006, NEW YORK – April 10, 2006, NEW YORK – NASA announced today that it will launch a new robotic mission to the moon in late 2008, piggybacking on the already-scheduled Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The new mission, called the LCROSS, or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, takes advantage of the extra payload capacity of NASA’s new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). The new mission has two components: An impactor will slam into the moon’s South Pole, sending up a massive plume of lunar dust almost 40 miles high....

How We TestedMedia Platforms Design TeamCelery’s fine structure showed how cleanly a blade could cut. Twine and chicken wire dispensed abuse.Precision: Clean cuts help plants heal. We snipped celery and shrubs–then peered closely.Sharpness: How sharp is sharp? For a hard test, we sliced 3/8-inch nylon/poly rope and No. 18 mason’s twine.Durability: We cut blade-dulling chicken wire, then sliced more celery to judge the abused blades’ precision.Felco 12 | $55Media Platforms Design TeamPrecisionFelco’s handle rotates for easy squeezing, but it has too much play and is difficult to keep under control....

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that will certainly not be the case for the next few days, because the Consumer Electronics Show is rolling into town. And so are we. Beginning Saturday night, Popular Mechanics will be following all the technology action (ooh, is that a new router?!) from the show floor. We’ll have video profiles of the hottest new products daily, the PM Editors’ Choice Awards on Monday evening, and hour-by-hour we’ll be blogging our hearts out....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’re like most people, you probably have an old TV or a broken computer monitor sitting in your garage, or perhaps a cellphone you retired early for an upgrade. Technology is advancing so quickly, according to a recent study by Pike Research, a clean-technology market research firm, that the average consumer is holding on to some 2.8 pieces of unused, broken or obsolete electronics equipment. Electronic waste, or e-waste, is the fastest growing category of trash, and it includes computers, cellphones, game consoles and some of the hardest-to-recycle materials....

Media Platforms Design TeamAre you wondering what part of your car will be the next to go south, and what it will cost to fix it? Or are you just curious why that pesky check engine light won’t go off? At PM, we’re bringing our readers a new and quick way to get a vehicle health snapshot, and know in advance what maintenance could be around the corner.CarMD, the company that sells the inexpensive diagnostic tool by the same name, has amassed huge database of auto repair information....

My favorite show on National Public Radio is Marketplace. It’s smart, it’s funny, and it’s surprisingly eclectic for a show on money and business. Last night, they did a segment on Germany’s booming solar industry. That’s right, Germany. Where BMW’s are made. Where you can chew the beer. Where it rains a whole heck of a lot. In fact, turns out Germany is the largest solar market in the world (Japan is second; California is third); in 2006, it was worth five billion bucks....

The “home of the future” has been promised to us since the 1950s (at least!), but now we’re near the “smart home” with the “Internet of everything” and whatever other words are currently bandied about in Silicon Valley. Your toaster will talk to your fridge, which will talk to your microwave, which will telepathically signal to your children that you love them. Or something.This Saturday Night Live skit takes on the “smart home” of the “future” by “turning it into a deeply creepy, deeply intrusive machination of an incompetent inventor” who “wants to put a smart recognition pipe” in a “very uncomfortable place” to “recognize” you....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast week, Davin Coburn headed to the Pacific Northwest to learn about one company’s revolutionary new build process for their high-performance kitplane—and then to go for a test drive, to figure out what it was like 180 degrees from a midtown Manhattan office. Catch up with his journey by clicking here, then take to the skies below… Morning at Elkin Creek begins with breakfast (by the former chef for The Rolling Stones), and a quick horseback ride over the grounds with Leah Knox, the ranch’s wrangler, and Heidi Fast, the lodge coordinator....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe’re working the room here at the Breakthrough Awards pre-show cocktail hour, where innovators of all ages from opposite fields—and competing companies—are meeting each other for the first time, talking with PM editors or just trying to avoid the four-leggedBigDog robot (middle of page) stumbling around the room.We spoke with the youngest of our Breakthrough honorees: Next Generation Award winners Deborah Sperling, Hannah Murnen, Nathan Sigworth and Augusta Niles....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: eROMAZe/Getty Images)Mind-controlled wheelchairs, exoskeletons and prosthetic limbs, are beginning to help patients, and brain-machine interface technology, move out of the lab and into the real world. Monkeys with electrodes implanted into their brains can steer a wheelchair using their thoughts, scientists reported this week at a major neuroscience meeting.Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis developed the technology as part of his group’s Walk Again Project, which aims to read the brain waves of paralyzed people and translate them into commands that can control prosthetics....

Media Platforms Design TeamUPDATE (9:39 p.m., March 17): Success! Just after 9 p.m. EDT last night, March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft completed its 17 minute-long process of entering orbit of Mercury. The spacecraft will now spend the next year in elliptical orbit. Mission scientists plan to begin collecting data on April 4, once they activate all seven of MESSENGER’s instruments.Tonight, if all goes well, NASA’s MESSENGER probe will complete a seven-year journey by entering orbit of Mercury....

Drones are not simply taking over the skies. They’re taking to the seas, too. The oceanic explorers of the future could be teams of ocean-going bots, manned or unmanned working together to gather more data than marine scientists have ever had to work with before. The Coordinated Robotics expedition is putting that vision to the test.On board the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel Falkor (which they get to borrow for free), the team, led by chief scientist Oscar Pizarro of The Australian Centre for Field Robotics at University of Sydney, can run experiments that examine the way multiple mechanical tools can work together....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today. Media Platforms Design TeamMove over, tattoos, there’s a new trend in town: embedding a magnet or microchip under the skin. According to NBC News, there’s a growing group of biohackers, grinders, and cyborgs who yearn to merge human with machine. The most common place for the microchip or magnet is just under the fingertips, since the skin is thinner there....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamPhoto credit: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty ImagesVirgin Group founder Richard Branson wants space to be for everyone—not just astronauts.SpaceX stole the show last week in space news with the unveiling of the Dragon V2 capsule, essentially the latest and great space taxi for astronauts. However, this announcement (though a big one it its own right) over shadowed the big changes that are happening to commercial space exploration....

Shortly before midnight on March 19, a heavyset 24-year-old man was standing outside a Mexican restaurant along West Arrow Highway in San Dimas, Calif., when a brawl broke out. No one is sure how the fight started in this small, affluent city east of Pasadena, but it came to a tragic end. The young man wound up on a stainless steel table in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, dead from multiple stab wounds....

Media Platforms Design TeamKatie Spotz’s 70-day transatlantic solo rowing adventure is at an end, but her achievement is one worth revisiting. The 22-year-old, the youngest ever to cross the Atlantic, and boat landed safely in Georgetown, Guyana in mid-March after battling 20-foot waves and a swelteringly hot sleep cabin over her 2817-mile journey. But what else went down during a 10-week sea voyage while she was cut off from the world?...