Living

Testing new and potential life-saving drugs can be a harrowing process because of the risk involved with not knowing how a substance will react once in the human body. Harvards scientists are hoping that microchips, such as the one pictured above, can mimic the function of human organs well enough for them to test those drugs. While the chip doesn't look like a human organ in any way, Inhabitat says that the little, seemingly simple objects are more than capable of replicating the processes of those organs. Each faux organ is made from a clear flexible polymer and is about the size of an average computer memory stick. The microchip organs feature hollow microfluidic channels that are lined with living human cells. Although they don't resemble the real shape of these organs inside the body, the cells allow scientists to observe how these organs might react to new drugs. The Harvard researchers hope to make 10 of these chips (each one associated with a different organ) and has ...

Christopher Columbus is a polarizing figure in modern America. He was a hero! He was a villain! But what if we look past the immediate consequences and look at his broader, unintended impacted on the human species as a whole? That's exactly what Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson does in this short video. Dr. Tyson was the headlining speaker at last week's First Comes the Dream event Gizmodo and io9 threw at the American Museum of Natural History. After his talk, rather than sneak away in a gigantic, star cluster-shaped limo, he spent hours standing around answering peoples' questions. To put this into context, this is what Dr. Tyson was saying leading up to his statement about Columbus: No life-form on Earth either lives or dies in vain. Because the fact that you die from some virus removes your gene-pool from what remains on the Earth, so that those who did not die from it have the immunity to it allowing them to continue forward. So you didn't die in vain and you didn't l...