In ancient story, the thunder god Thor represents strength, power, but also can be deceived. A king gave Thor three tests. First, he asked Thor to finish drinking wine in the horn. Second, Thor was told to lift up a big cat's paw. Third, Thor would fight with an old lady. All of the tests above were failed, now the King revealed the answers, 1) the horn he drunk with was set into the sea, the sea can never be finished 2) the paw he left up was the foot of his own, how can lift up own feet from…

According to articles in the UK press, Yoshi Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has "deliberately created a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system". Some reports even allege the work recreates the deadly 1918 pandemic flu virus in a form that resists vaccines.

These are waves worth catching. Generating tiny swells in a dish of saline solution prompts beads, copper powder and even cells to assemble into a panoply of intricate patterns. It could offer a simple way to build elaborate structures that may be useful for microelectronics and making human tissue. Many attempts at small-scale construction build structures piece by piece, which can be time-consuming for complex products. Other methods can only use specific building blocks, such as magnetic materials . Now a team led by Utkan Demirci at Stanford University in California has found a way to quickly build micro-sized structures…

Red blood cells may one day do more than carry oxygen around the body – they have been genetically engineered to act as miniature drug delivery vehicles. Many drugs only last for hours in the bloodstream before being broken down by the liver. Since red blood cells live for several months, a team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts wondered if engineering them to carry drugs may offer a longer-lasting alternative. To find out, the researchers took bone marrow from mice and isolated the cellular precursors to red blood cells. They inserted a gene for a protein…

ONE moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area. Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been able to turn off consciousness – until now. Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions.…