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Chatting on the red carpet with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence; recording a country song with Clint Black; working a relief mission with Patricia Arquette; receiving a serenade from Michael Bolton on a Caribbean island. These are just some of the WOW! moments possible for everyday donors through a new online charity service that combines star power with digital marketing savvy to contribute millions to celebrity causes worldwide.

In proof-of-concept experiments, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine demonstrate the ability to tune medically relevant cell behaviors by manipulating a key hub in cell communication networks. The manipulation of this communication node, reported in this week’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes it possible to reprogram large parts of a cell’s signaling network instead of targeting only a single receptor or cell signaling pathway.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s claim during a recent blizzard that food delivery bikes were not emergency vehicles caused a small disruption in the City’s normally fast, abundant and inexpensive access to nearly any type of food from around the world. For major food companies that ensure this access, blizzards here or droughts in California increase costs, affect supply and demand, and change trade patterns.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—which, among other things, helped lead to the discovery of black holes, those mysterious, spacetime-bending collapsed stars. Now Marcia Bartusiak, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Graduate Science Writing Program, has a new book out, “Black Hole,” published today by Yale University Press, which details the history of the discovery of black holes.

There are five motivators for creating novel content online, whether blog posts, shared news stories, images, photos, songs, videos or any of the other digital artifacts users of social media and social networking sites share endlessly. Research just published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising suggests that these five factors are: entertainment, self-expression, social-belonging, communication, and social-cognition.

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have discovered a method to increase the amount of electric charge that can be stored in graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon. The research, published recently online in the journal Nano Letters, may provide a better understanding of how to improve the energy storage ability of capacitors for potential applications in cars, wind turbines, and solar power.

Neuropeptides are small proteins in the brains of all animals that bind to receptor proteins and cause activity in cells. The researchers at Queen Mary University of London, led by Professor Maurice Elphick, were investigating whether a particular sea urchin neuropeptide was an evolutionary link between neuropeptides in humans and insects.

Five years after the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, the industry is working on drilling even further into the risky depths beneath the Gulf of Mexico to tap massive deposits once thought unreachable. Opening this new frontier, miles below the bottom of the Gulf, requires engineering feats far beyond those used at BP’s much shallower Macondo well.

Six authors have described their work in harvesting energy in a paper titled “Ultrathin, Rollable, Paper-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Acoustic Energy Harvesting and Self-Powered Sound Recording.” Translation: A paper microphone may help charge your cellphone. Jacob Aron in New Scientist wrote about their work; he said one benefit of such a microphone is that it could harvest acoustic energy to top up a phone charge on the go

New research proposes that chondrules, small glassy beads that make up the bulk of the most primitive meteorites, played a crucial role in the formation of planets. Simulations developed by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Lund University in Sweden, and collaborating institutions show how asteroid-sized planetesimals—the building blocks of planets—can grow to observed sizes by sweeping up chondrules, each only about the size of a grain of sand