Let's be clear: That Harvard scientist you heard about is NOT seeking an "adventurous woman" to give birth to a "cloned cave baby."

But that was the juicy story making its way around Web on Tuesday.

The blowup began when the German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Harvard synthetic biologist George Church, who is well-known for his genome sequencing effort, the Personal Genome Project, and for all sorts of other unusual and creative projects such as encoding his new book, "Regenesis," in actual DNA.

In his interview with Der Spiegel, Church discussed a number of ways "DNA will...

Scientists have taken the highest resolution images of the sun’s atmosphere ever, and it offers an explanation for the decades-old mystery of why its outer most layer is up to 800 times hotter than its surface.

Using photos from the High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) that was flung into space in July, scientists observed small bands of magnetism near the star’s surface twist, turn and braid together before snapping apart, releasing heat and energy flares that heated up the star’s atmosphere. NASA officials described their findings Wednesday.

The sun’s surface is a...

Swarms of spacecraft may soon be mining asteroids for fuel and minerals and building spare parts in space, if a new private space venture has its way.

Harvesting the resources available in the giant space rocks flying around the solar system could allow spacecraft to build parts when they break or refill their tanks on the long trek to Mars, Deep Space Industries officials said in a news conference Tuesday at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica.

Deep Space hopes to launch small, low-cost spacecraft called fireflies by 2015. Weighing about 55 pounds, fireflies would use existing technology and...

Male scientists, particularly those of high academic rank, are more likely than women to commit research fraud and other forms of misconduct, according to a study.

In a paper published Monday in mBio, the online journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers suggested that a penchant among men for risk-taking and an increasingly competitive “winner-take-all” funding environment were among the reasons for growing misconduct in life sciences research.

The study, which defines misconduct as falsification, fabrication or plagiarism, examined 227 cases of misconduct...

Doctors have discovered a way for professional football players to see how much damage their brains have suffered through a bruising career before it’s too late, according to a new study.

UCLA researchers led a team of scientists that used a chemical marker called FDDNP to measure the degree of brain damage in five retired football players. That marker latches onto the tau proteins that build up in the brain when someone suffers from Alzheimer’s or other cognitive impairments like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Doctors can then perform a routine positron emission tomography...

If Mars once contained life, it might have existed in watery oases far beneath the surface, according to a new study analyzing a deep Martian crater holding signs of an ancient lake.

The research, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, examined the 57-mile-wide McLaughlin Crater, which at 1.4 miles deep may have been low enough to allow underground water to well up into its bowl.

Though Mars looks like a dry, dusty planet, scientists believe the planet once held enough water that it left signs of streambeds on the surface. If Mars also held organic molecules like carbon,...

Serving hot food on melamine tableware could increase your exposure to melamine, a study released Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine suggests.

 Melamine, an industrial chemical used in everyday items such as cooking utensils, plates, paperboard and industrial coatings can apparently seep into food when it's heated, the study said.

In two separate tests, researchers from Kaohsiung Medical University and Kaohsiung Municipal Hsiao-Kang Hospital in Taiwan served a dozen participants about two cups of hot noodle soup in melamine bowls and ceramic bowls. After participants ate out of the...

Worried that your genetic information could be revealed?  You should be, says Harvard geneticist George Church. 

But it doesn't have to keep you from participating in genetic studies.

DNA privacy has been a subject of concern this week, as a team of geneticists reported Thursday in the journal Science that it was able to figure out the names of people who had donated their DNA to research -- even though test subjects' identities were stripped from their genomic data.

Using information posted to genealogy websites and other publicly available Internet resources, the Whitehead Institute...

Why are women more prone to autoimmune diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis? A new study in mice points to a possible contributor: different types of bacteria that populate our guts.

It goes like this: Different mixes of bacteria reside in the innards of male and female mice. Those bacteria, in turn, affect the chemistry of the animals’ bodies -- and, it appears, their risk of autoimmunity.

The study, just published in Science, was done by Janet Markle of the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Toronto, and colleagues. It’s a little...

Paging Dr. House: There a new tick-transmitted spirochete in town, and this wily relative of the organism that causes Lyme disease is probably sickening more than 4,300 Americans a year with relapsing fevers and flu-like symptoms, according to a new report. The good news: A round of common antibiotics appears capable of vanquishing the newly discovered threat.

The organism, called Borrelia miyamotoi, was discovered in 1995 in Japan, but it was not until 2011 that disease hunters found and described evidence that it was making people sick in Central Russia. The organism was found in deer ticks...

It’s the dream of any parent whose child is diagnosed with autism: The symptoms will fade away over time.

What keeps the dream alive is that in rare cases it comes true. Several studies over the years have documented cases in which children have improved so much that they no longer meet the criteria for diagnosis or require extra support in school.

Those children have long presented a puzzle to researchers. What distinguishes them from people for whom autism is a lifelong condition? And what distinguishes them from people with typical early childhood development?

Deborah Fein, a...