Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to bring silent video footage to audible life, using a very high-tech analogue to lip-reading. Instead of watching mouth movements, the scientists are detecting the minute vibrations that sound waves make when they strike an everyday object—anything from a house plant to a potato chip bag. “People didn’t realize that this information was there,” MIT researcher Abe Davis said in a statement. Davis and colleagues presented their findings in a paper for the 2014 Siggraph computer graphics conference. The researchers trained a high-speed camera on a potted plant that was placed near a speaker playing the song “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” The vibrations of the plant’s leaves caused by the song are extremely tiny—enough to nudge a leaf by just one one-hundredth of a pixel—making them invisible to the naked eye. But the researchers can use computer programs to filter through all the minute variations passing through the video and extract what is unmistakably the audio of that song. To kick the research up a notch, the scientists managed to catch traces of a human voice singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by filming a potato chip bag …

Humanity’s war against the HIV has been a constantly shifting battle, thanks to the wily nature of the virus. But humans, being quite wily themselves, have persevered in the search for a cure despite setback after setback. Just this week, scientists found a way to snip HIV’s genetic code out from the genomes of infected cells. The technique’s only been tried in cultured cells so far, but it could represent a powerful new weapon in the arsenal against AIDS. But just what makes HIV such a formidable foe?

Every day, we toss around ‘official numbers’ we only dimly, at best, understand. But now the next time you apply sunscreen, take shelter during an earthquake, check the weather, or turn up the volume of your music, you might just have a better idea of what’s really going on.

The comic rappers behind the web series “Epic Rap Battles of History” came out with a new installment, pitting Sir Isaac Newton (“Weird Al” Yankovic) against Bill Nye (“Nice Peter”), with an assist by Neil deGrasse Tyson (Jurassic 5’s Chali 2na). But the rhymes flow so fast that you might miss some of the neat scientific and historical references. We’ve got you covered, though: 00:11: Why is it Sir Isaac Newton, anyway? Newton was knighted by England’s Queen Anne in 1705, ostensibly for his scientific achievements, but actually more as a political power play. Newton’s patron, Charles Montagu, the First Earl of Halifax, arranged the knighthood to bolster Newton’s reputation before a parliamentary election. Unfortunately, Newton ended up losing anyway. 00:15: “Of all the scientific minds in history/ They put Beaker in a bow tie up against me?”: Newton is unfavorably comparing Bill Nye to the Muppet Beaker, the lab assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, who speaks mostly in “meep”s. 00:20: “You’re no match for me/You got a bach degree”: Bill Nye does, indeed, hold only a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University (not counting various honorary degrees). He began working as an engineer at Boeing right after college. 00:22: …

Mapping brain regions is starting to allow us to restore lost movement to the paralyzed and grant limited amounts of sight to the blind (lab mice, that is). But will scientists be able to go even further in coming decades, allowing us to upgrade, copy, or even move our brains around to other substrates besides a meat puppet with a shelf life of about 100 years, at best? These and other far-off future concepts took center stage in the program Cells To Silicon: Your Brain in 2050, part of the Big Ideas Series at the 2014 World Science Festival. “Tonight we can dream a little bit,” moderator and NPR journalist Robert Krulwich said in his introduction. “Science invites crazy dreams.” Welding a brain to a machine is what allowed Cathy Hutchinson—who was left completely paralyzed by a brain stem stroke—to take her first drink of coffee under her own power in more than a decade. Hutchinson raised the water bottle full of java to her own lips with a brain-linked robotic arm developed by Cells to Silicon panelist and Brown University researcher John Donoghue: The arm is linked via wires to a hairbrush-shaped brain implant about the size of an …