Discovery documents uncover the corporate capture of science, which puts public health, and the very foundation of democracy, at risk.

While passing a placard of contemporary protest buttons in New York's Greenwich Village, my attention was drawn to one that read "Science is Peer Reviewed, Not Politician Approved."

This short aphorism brought into focus two unfortunate realities. First, there are growing segments of the population who have lost confidence in science and choose to act on un-scientific or pseudo-scientific truth claims. And second, other segments of the population view scientists as just another stakeholder group subject to the same market influences in the competition for producing credible knowledge.

The probe will return samples of this space rock to Earth in 2020

After more than three years' lonely travel through the solar system, the Japanese spacefaring robot Hayabusa2 has reached its home-away-from-home for the next 18 months: the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency on June 27 confirmed Hayabusa2's arrival at the kilometer-wide boulder, which circles the sun between Earth and Mars. The spacecraft is now hovering about 20 kilometers above Ryugu.

The launch of privately developed Japanese sounding rocket MOMO-2 resulted in a catastrophic failure, as the spacecraft crashed back to Earth after only a few seconds in flight. The rocket exploded, damaging the ground facilities.

The MOMO rocket family is developed by a private startup company with the ambitious name 'Interstellar Technologies.' The rocket was launched from Taiki, Hokkaido prefecture early on Saturday morning.

The rocket successfully blasted off from the launchpad, but only seconds into the flight its engine shut down. The spacecraft then emitted a thick plume of gray smoke, while fire emerged from the side of its fuel tank, presumably due to rupture. The rocket then crashed back to Earth, exploding in a spectacular fireball, and setting the launchpad ablaze.

The future Russian spacecraft, set to replace tried and trusted Soyuz, has been tested in a hypersonic wind tunnel. The capsule will not be protected by a fairing during launch and requires refining of its shape and composition.

The spacecraft, called PTK Federation, has been meticulously developed during the past decade. It is being designed to eventually replace the Soyuz in manned missions and also to serve as a space freighter to supply orbital stations like the ISS.

In late April three scale models of Federation were delivered to the facilities of TsAGI, or Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, a leading Russian aviation and space laboratory. The lab has since been testing how the future spacecraft fares under enormous stress during launch and reentry phases. According to an industry source cited by the news agency TASS, the most serious tests in the TsAGI hypersonic wind tunnel have been successfully completed while those involving supersonic flows would continue until the end of the year.

Frankenstein is the timeless story of reanimating a dead body through the use of technology.

And now a team of researchers in the US seem to be walking in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's creation with a new experiment.

Teams at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are experimenting with lumps of tissue taken from fossil bones of our early ancestors

They've reportedly managed to grow tiny brains, about the size of a pea, in petri dishes inside labs.

They say the next step is to link these cavemen brains to robots using neural implants to try and create a kind of Neanderthal cyborg.

This, in turn, will allow them to find out what caused Neanderthals to go extinct - leaving homo sapiens to colonise the Earth.

In our eternal quest to seek out new life, humanity has tried to make contact with extraterrestrials in some pretty weird ways. We've sent quite a few objects into space, some of which may truly confuse any aliens who find them.

Gazing at the night sky we often ask ourselves if there's anyone out there on planets orbiting faraway stars in the deep vastness of the universe.

In an attempt to communicate with the unknown, we've launched orbital missions and shot space probes past the edges of our Solar System. But it might have taken a few bizarre turns along the way though, as humanity has launched some unusual objects into space to tell the aliens something about who we are.

Heroin and other opioids increase the amount of hypocretin-producing nerve cells

Using opioids gives some brain cells a call to action.

Opioid addicts' brains, examined after death, contain about 50 percent more nerve cells that release a molecule called hypocretin, compared with people who didn't use the drugs, a new study finds. Giving the opiate morphine to mice also induced similar changes in their brains. But the increase didn't come from new nerve cells, or neurons, being born. Instead, once-dormant neurons appear to rev up their hypocretin machinery in response to the addictive drugs, researchers report June 27 in Science Translational Medicine.

The findings fit with a growing body of research that suggests that hypocretin, a brain chemical that regulates wakefulness and arousal, may also be involved in addiction.

From Tokyo Rose's radio broadcasts to American soldiers blasting Van Halen to force out Panamanian dictators, breaking the will of an enemy has always been one of the most important goals of warfare, primarily because it's much easier to win battles if the enemy gives themselves up without a fight. For years, many armies have relied on dropping leaflets on the enemy from the air, but a new prototype created by the U.S. Special Operations Forces Command (USSOCOM) takes the concept of propaganda leaflets to the next level by essentially being a piece of paper that can talk to enemy combatants who pick it up.

The USSOCOM prototype is incredibly thin-only the thickness of four sheets of paper-and has the ability to repeat a 30-second message. Now that they have a prototype to show people what they're looking for, they're asking private companies to propose improvements on it, including potential features like "printable electronics incorporating 'flexible micro-circuitry', [a] flexible speaker, and super thin photovoltaic batteries."

Astronomers have spotted a mysteriously gargantuan explosion a hundred times more massive than an exploding star and they have no idea what it is.

More than a dozen telescopes from all over the world have recorded the inexplicable event, which was first seen on June 16 in the skies above Hawaii.

Early speculations point to a giant cloud of high-speed particles moving at a rate of 12,000 miles per second and registering a temperature of 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit. However, everything is a wild guess at this point.

Schrödinger's kittens have never been very cute, and the latest litter is no exception. Images of nebulous clouds of ultracold atoms or microscopic strips of silicon are unlikely to go viral on the internet. All the same, these exotic objects are worth heeding, because they show with unprecedented clarity that quantum mechanics is not just the physics of the extremely small.

"Schrödinger's kittens," loosely speaking, are objects pitched midway in size between the atomic scale, which quantum mechanics was originally developed to describe, and the cat that Erwin Schrödinger famously invoked to highlight the apparent absurdity of what that theory appeared to imply. These systems are "mesoscopic" - perhaps around the size of viruses or bacteria, composed of many thousands or even billions of atoms, and thus much larger than the typical scales at which counterintuitive quantum-mechanical properties usually appear. They are designed to probe the question: How big can you get while still preserving those quantum properties?

To judge by the latest results, the answer is: pretty darn big. Two distinct types of experiments - both of them carried out by several groups independently - have shown that vast numbers of atoms can be placed in collective quantum states, where we can't definitely say that the system has one set of properties or another. In one set of experiments, this meant "entangling" two regions of a cloud of cold atoms to make their properties interdependent and correlated in a way that seems heedless of their spatial separation. In the other, microscopic vibrating objects were maneuvered into so-called superpositions of vibrational states. Both results are loosely analogous to the way Schrödinger's infamous cat, while hidden away in its box, was said to be in a superposition of live and dead states.