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A dramatic rise in the number of cases of a deadly disease spread by ticks has prompted health officials in Canada to expand their monitoring of ticks. Ticks are feared spreading an extremely rare but potentially deadly virus.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, it has significantly increased screening for Powassan virus in the tiny, blood-sucking arachnids to include blacklegged ticks.

New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maine witnessed human cases of the virus this spring. The virus can cause encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain. Several other states are on alert and on the lookout for the disease.

As per a federal data released Thursday, use of the e-cigarettes among middle school and high school students has tripled from 2013 to 2014. Now, the share of high school students who use e-cigarettes stands at 13%.

Around 25% of all high school students and 8% of middle school students totaling 4.6 million young people had used tobacco in some form in 2014. Another revelation made in the report is that from 2011 to 2014, a major decline has come in the percentage of high school students who smoked traditional cigarettes, from 16% to 9%.

This decline could be an indication of a shift from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Currently, smoking is the biggest reason of preventable death in America. The habit takes life of more than 480,000 Americans per year.

CRISPR-Cas9 is one of the most advanced technologies developed for genome engineering. But it has been found that it has become the subject of a legal battle with billion dollar implications.

Using the technology, DNA can be cut and pasted with a high level of perfection and ease. The invention has revolutionized cloning and will immensely benefit gene therapy. On Monday, a legal request has been filed by the University of California.

The university has asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to establish who has invented the technology. In 2014, more than 10 patents were issued to MIT/Harvard Broad Institute, Massachusetts. But University of California and two co-petitioners have claimed that the right should belong to them.

Not a long time back, there were rumors that Florida Gov. Rick Scott had announced an unwritten ban on the use of few terms, including global warming and climate change. But it seems that the rumors were not true.

On Wednesday during a hearing, secretary of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, Jonathan Steverson said climate change three times. He also affirmed that he has taken the name climate change repeatedly three times. He also clarified that there is no such policy issued against climate change.

His proof that rumors are wrong was found to be convincing. Also, it also contradicts the reports of many former DEP employees and also of the ones employed by other state government officials. They have been told not to use these terms in official communications.

The Messenger spacecraft will soon end a 10-year mission orbiting the planet Mercury. The spacecraft will crash into the planet on April 30.

Presently, the space vehicle is skimming above the surface of the planet. The spacecraft that was sent to the space on August 3, 2004, will run out of fuel and will crash into innermost world of the solar system. MESSENGER was the second to Mercury after Mariner 10 mission of 1974 and 1975.

"A lot of people didn't give this spacecraft much of a chance of even getting to Mercury, let alone going into orbit and then gathering data for four years instead of the original scheduled one-year mission", said William McClintock of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at Colorado University-Boulder.

Researchers at NASA and the University of California at Berkeley have been working on a robot that's robust enough to be dropped directly onto planets and go straight to work.

Current missions to Mars have been very complex especially while using parachutes for guiding robots and their delicate scientific instruments down to the surface.

In 2012, things were more high-tech, as the space agency used a hovering platform for lowering the Mars Rover onto the planet.

Contrary to it, prototypes of the new robot are quite similar to something a child might make in a craft class but what it lacks in the terms of appearance, more than that it makes up for in physics.