The sun uses fusion energy and everyone likes the idea of solar power but it requires a lot of infrastructure to translate that fusion energy to our usable kind. Fusion energy on Earth has been studied for decades, and it really isn't close, but if it takes another 50 years, it will be worth it. For that to happen, some known obstacles have to be overcome. 

Online course platforms are good for easier topics, like manufacturing or history, but they only provide a sort of "X For Dummies" way to get overview knowledge of science (still, free is hard to complain about) but Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is trying to do what Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare or iTunes U and even Phet Interactive Simulations cannot - let students interact with a real physical experiment.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has developed software for an experiment that can be observed and controlled from anywhere in the world. And a lot of it has been developed by high school and undergraduate interns.

Mapping the rise of life during the period of Earth's early history is challenging. Earth's oldest sedimentary rocks are not only rare, but have almost always altered by hydrothermal and tectonic activity.

But sometimes there are dramatic finds. A new study has revealed the well-preserved remnants of a complex ecosystem in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old sedimentary rock sequence in Australia. 

All musical training has some benefits for brains, but new research shows how brain regions communicate during the creation of music and find that extensive musical training affects the structure and function of different brain regions and even how the brain interprets and integrates sensory information.

These insights suggest potential new roles for musical training including fostering plasticity in the brain, an alternative tool in education, and treating a range of learning disabilities.

The new findings say that: 

What color is H? Is 4 brighter than 9?

Those questions don't make sense to many people but for people with grapheme-color synesthesia, they have real answers.

Patients may soon be able to get a bionic pick-me-up without undergoing the pain and lengthy recovery of surgery - an exoskeleton to support people who, through age or injury, are limited in their movement.

A new study has found that engaging in a physical exercise regimen helps healthy aging adults improve their memory, brain health and physical fitness - a significant finding considering that, among adults 50 and older, "staying mentally sharp" outranks social security and physical health as their top concern.

In the summer of 2012 I wrote Celiac: The Trendy Disease For Rich White People, which annoyed a few people with celiac disease but a whole bunch of people who had latched onto a fad and craved medical or scientific legitimacy in doing so.

Yes, yes, we’ve covered this territory before. But you might have heard that Sam Harris has reopened the discussion by challenging his critics, luring them out of their hiding places with the offer of cold hard cash.

What do bullies and sex have in common?
  The same part of the brain reacts to both. 

In a recent study, researchers found that different types of fear are processed by different groups of neurons in mice, even if the animals act out those fears in the same way - which could have implications for addressing phobias and panic attacks in humans.

"We found that there seems to be a circuit for handling fear of predators – which has been described anatomically as a kind of defense circuit – but fear of members of the same species uses the reproductive circuit instead," says Bianca Silva of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy, who carried out the work, "and fear of pain goes through yet another part of the brain."