Uncategorized
- Health & Medicine
Explainer: What is a hookah?
Many teens are turning to water pipes as a potentially safer alternative to conventional cigarettes. But they’d be wrong.
- Health & Medicine
Explainer: What are e-cigarettes?
New battery-powered devices deliver nicotine, a dangerous and addictive drug.
- Physics
Laser tweezers grab nano bits
An optical fiber, a bit of gold and a laser make up a new type of tweezers. Scientists may soon use it to pick up and move around individual viruses or proteins.
- Health & Medicine
Low protein, longer life — for some
Eating less protein can lengthen life and improve health. That’s the message from new studies in mice and in people.
- Space
Galaxy drags trail of newborn stars
Distant galaxy plows through cluster of others, with baby stars in tow
- Environment
Burning to learn
Fires cause billions of dollars of destruction to homes and forests every year. But not all fires are bad, especially for forests. With a better understanding of fire, scientists can both help people prevent dangerous fires — and identify which ones it would be better to let burn.
- Environment
Explainer: How and why fires burn
A fire’s colorful flame results from a chemical reaction known as combustion.
- Tech
Branching out for safer water
Clean drinking water could be only a tree branch away, a new study finds.
- Earth
Earthquake-triggered lightning?
An experiment with beads offers support for the claim that a rare type of lightning may accompany some quakes.
- Computing
Teen wins $100,000 for flu advance
Forty talented high-school seniors competed in the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search this week, sharing $630,000 in prizes. Top prize went to a teen for his new approach to fighting flu.
- Animals
Passing diseases from bee to bee
A study finds that the viruses and parasites that plague honeybees can infect bumblebees too, sickening another important pollinator.
- Health & Medicine
Simple test for cancer and heart disease
Disease diagnosis often requires expensive equipment and tests to probe deep inside the body. But a new test relies on a fast, cheap and easy technique. And its answers appear on a strip of paper — just as they do on a pregnancy test.
