All Stories
- Animals
One plus to wearing stripes
A zebra’s black-and-white coat doesn’t offer cooling or camouflage, researchers find. Instead, its stripes appear to keep away biting flies — and deadly diseases.
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A toy to visualize the body’s electricity
A hands-on way to let kids experiment with neuroscience placed second in the first annual Science, Play and Research Kit contest.
- Brain
Loneliness can breed disease
Everyone experiences loneliness from time to time. But when allowed to persist, loneliness can damage your health and steal years from your life.
- Health & Medicine
Explainer: Tips for overcoming loneliness
This assortment of tips can help overcome loneliness. The approach focuses on changing — for the better — those ways in which you and others interact.
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A new grant for young inventors
Lemelson-MIT has a grant that lets high school students flex their design muscles. The new program offers guided instruction for younger students.
- Chemistry
Urine may make Mars travel possible
On Earth, urine is a waste. En route to Mars, it could be a precious renewable commodity: the source of drinking water and energy.
- Science & Society
E-cigarette makers focus on teens
A high-level group of senators and members of the U.S. House of Representatives surveyed makers of e-cigarettes and finds they are targeting youth. They conclude that new federal laws should be created to end practices that could turn teens into nicotine addicts.
- Physics
World’s coolest ‘clock’ is also crazy-accurate
This is the time to beat — the world’s most accurate atomic clock ever. At its heart is a ‘fountain’ of cesium atoms chilled nearly to absolute zero!
- Physics
Explainer: How lasers make ‘optical molasses’
Light can bump an atom. Bump it from several different directions at once and even a fast-moving atom will instantly freeze its motion — and chill it to a temperature of nearly absolute zero.
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Teaching clean energy with the power of wind
A build-your-own wind energy machine can be a fun and inexpensive way to practice engineering and discover the power of wind.
- Microbes
A success for designer life
Synthetic biologists are scientists who create custom organisms in the lab. Their efforts have just taken a big step forward. They have created the first lab-made yeast chromosome. The advance could lead to entirely synthetic organisms customized to produce food, fuel or medicine.
- Physics
Sending student science to space
Two teachers describe how they worked with the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program to get middle-school scientists excited about research and space.
