Science is doing some crazy things in the world of genetics these days. Have you heard about the half goat, half spider?

Dragline silk, produced by spiders and used to catch them when they fall, is incomprehensibly strong for it’s weight. It’s stronger than kevlar used in bullet-proof vests. The possible uses are endless. The thing is, spiders are tough to gather and ‘farm for their silk.’ They produce a miniscule amount of this fiber, so we’re unable to harvest it to study and use.

That’s where the goats come into play. Using a form of DNA adjustment called synthetic biology, scientists have taken the gene associated with the production of dragline silk in spiders, and mixed it into the DNA that promotes milk production in goats. They can now obtain drastically more silk in a more controlled manner. Scientists are referring to this technique as advanced farming.

Sending messages has gotten rather boring these days. Pony Express? Yeah right. E-mail? So 20th century. Text messages? Played out. When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sent out a challenge to devise a new form of message encryption, a team of scientists at Tufts University stepped up to the plate.

Pretty cool stuff coming out of the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scientists have been studying one of the strangest behaving materials known to man with some amazing potential future applications.

Pharmaceuticals is one of the largest and most necessary industries on the planet. Every single person on Earth has something wrong with them; whether it be a headache, anxiety, or some sort of uncontrollable pain. We all require some sort of medication to help us cope with these problems.

The main issue is, that for each new drug that is introduced to the market, a particular company must spend anywhere from $100-400 million on research and development. These costs are often passed down to the consumer, and even with top-end insurance or medicare coverage, we’re forced to pay each time we re-up on our drug of necessity. Could there be a low cost alternative lurking in the air? There are those who believe so. Welcome to the amazing world of binaural audio.

Amazing news out of Stockholm today, where Swedish scientists won the ongoing battle of who could successfully teleport the first human being. 46 year old Oskar Svensson was almost instantaneously teleported from the Stockholm Science Institute Headquarters, to a separate underground branch in Karlstad. The report said that according to the on location sensors, Svensson was able to travel 180.4 miles in 2.54 seconds. Just when you thought you had seen it all, an incredible story like this breaks.

There are over 40 million blind people in the world. Individuals without sight are forced to hire orientation and mobility specialists to help them move around town. Some common techniques include devising consistent and familiar routes, using a walking cane, and obtaining a specially trained seeing eye dog. Similarly, phone apps have been designed that give the blind detailed directions to navigate around town. All of these alternatives are great, but the one common denominator is the slow rate of speed at which a visually impaired human beings must travel alone. Amazingly, though, a major breakthrough in this field is on the horizon.

Whether it be a family member or friend, most of us, unfortunately, have had to deal with cancer at some point in our lives. Scientists at Stanford have uncovered an antibody that, when administered to human tumors, broke down the cancerous tumors associated with brain, breast, prostate, liver, ovarian, bowel, and bladder cancer.

Crew members aboard the ISS scrambled into an emergency exit craft as stray debris from a forgotten Russian satellite surprised NASA. The debris was only noticed on Friday, which evidently did not give the monitoring team enough time to create a sizable distance between the ISS and the scrap. NASA couldn’t even determine the exact size of the debris, although any small amount can jeopardize the entire craft.

Astounde covered the story of the incredible threat posed by space junk in this article in mid-February. Swiss scientists are currently designing a project called Clean Space One to help alleviate this problem. The article is a fascinating read if you hadn’t heard of it yet. Hopefully the hard working scientists can get Clean Space One implemented soon, as the lives of the six crew members onboard are too valuable to be left to chance.

There are millions of people on Earth who litter and think nothing of it. Biodegradable items such as banana peels are kosher, as they usually disappear in under a month. One of the peskier items to be littered is plastic. Plastic has plagued scientists, due to it’s lingering nature and it’s inability to be properly disposed of. It is feared that it can take anywhere from 500-1,000 years for plastic to decompose in landfills.

Countless consumer items are based out of plastic, many we don’t even realize are a plastic. In this disposable day and age where items quickly lose their value and we toss them we buy more, the question of where all of the mounds of trash worldwide will go has been a plaguing concern. We may be on the right path to solving this issue. A group of students and professors from Yale made an astounding discovery this month; uncovering a fungi that eats pesky plastics to survive.

One of the most exciting pieces of technology soon to be unleashed on the world has got the be the powered exoskeleton suit. An exoskeleton is “a hard outer structure, such as the shell of an insect or crustacean, that provides protection or support for an organism.” Human’s are naturally equipped with an endoskeleton, but imagine the possibilities if we could have both?