Every generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of the generations who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” wrote Isaac Newton. In a special series, the World Science Festival invites audiences to stand on the shoulders of modern-day giants.

In his research, U.K. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has tackled topics as varied as the Big Bang, quasars, and more far-out ideas like the search for dark matter and the …

Using the Shrinky Dinks toy as inspiration, biomedical engineer Michelle Khine invented a way to shrink lab testing materials and equipment, resulting in increased testing speed and reliability while lowering …

What is time? Isaac Newton described it as absolute, but Einstein proved that time is relative, and, shockingly, that time and space are intricately interwoven. Now recent work in string theory and quantum gravity suggests that space and time may not be fundamental. If this is true, what new picture of reality will emerge?

For the last half century we have slipped the surly bonds of earth with landers, rovers and spacecraft that have allowed us to touch the very edge of the Solar …

Powerful new genetic tools allow scientists to alter the DNA of any organism—with tests on human embryos already underway. Even more ambitious, synthetic biologists on the verge of creating the genetic material for a living organism from scratch are setting their long-term sites on fashioning a fully synthetic human genome.