The bits of rock on Scott Anderson's shelf are not much to look at, but they have stories to tell. In a plastic case is a greenish-grey rock, a 4.5-billion-year-old piece of the asteroid Vesta. Next to it rests a dark sliver of 2.8-billion-year-old lava from the Moon. Anderson, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, picks up his favourite, a 1-gram slice of rock that cost him US$800.

Have you ever wondered why, in the ongoing presidential campaign, we so strongly hear the pipes calling us to arms? Why the religious among us bristle at any challenge to the creation story they believe? Or even why team sports evoke such intense loyalty, joy, and despair?

NEW YORK – Within the tech community, there is much angst about whether the Web is about to be “closed.” Will it be controlled by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, or will it remain “open” to all? Will individuals be able to reach any content they choose? Will developers be able to serve users on any platform?

Open-science advocates fail to reproduce controversial findings.

STANFORD – During the past several decades, treatment for a variety of conditions has begun to shift from a “one size fits all” approach to a more personalized strategy. As a result, patients can more often be matched to the best drug for their genetic makeup or the exact subcategory of their disease. This enables physicians to avoid prescribing a medication (or a dosage) that might cause serious side effects in certain populations.

The start-up has grabbed the attention of world's media, but faces competition in the race to commercialize a plenoptic camera.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the US Food and Drug Administration. His most recent book is The Frankenfood Myth.

PALO ALTO – “It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive... IT’S ALIVE!” So said Dr. Victor Frankenstein when his “creation” was complete. Researchers have long been fascinated with trying to create life, but mainly they have had to settle for crafting variations of living organisms via mutation or other techniques of genetic engineering.

A decade after the human-genome project, writes Geoffrey Carr (interviewed here), biological science is poised on the edge of something wonderful

Scientists in the United States have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.

Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds.