Engineering Design
- Brain
Patterns in brain activity can identify who will struggle to read
Certain patterns of brain activity predict whether teens are strong readers or will struggle. Those diagnostic patterns show up even when doing math.
- Chemistry
Level up your demonstration: Make it an experiment
What’s the difference between a demonstration and an experiment? Questions, measurements and many, many replications.
- Earth
Light levitation might help explore Earth’s ‘ignorosphere’
A toy called a light mill inspired researchers to invent a new way to fly. They’re using light to levitate small nanotube-coated discs.
- Space
Ingenuity helicopter makes history by flying on Mars
The copter's 40-second-long flight in the Red Planet’s thin air is only the first in a planned series of daring flights.
- Health & Medicine
Bandages made from crab shells speed healing
The chitin in seafood wastes, insect “bones” and fungi is a chemist’s dream. Used in a new medical dressing, it beats regular gauze for wound healing.
- Health & Medicine
Could a toothpaste help treat peanut allergy?
By rolling an immune therapy into a toothbrushing routine, one company hopes to show its product can build and maintain tolerance to peanut allergens.
- Physics
Getting cozy with a science experiment
Items you use in your home can inspire a scientific experiment.
- Animals
Science and Indigenous history team up to help spirit bears
When scientists and Indigenous people work together, their efforts can benefit bears and people.
- Animals
Analyze This: Cows burp less methane after early-life treatment
Calves that receive the 14-week treatment belch less of the greenhouse gas, possibly due to shifts in their gut microbes.
- Brain
Scientists may have finally found how catnip repels insects
The plant deters mosquitoes and fruit flies by triggering a chemical receptor that, in some animals, senses pain and itch.
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Moderna and Pfizer vaccines appear to cut coronavirus spread
The vaccines are about 90 percent effective at blocking infection, which should cut spread of the virus. And at least one vaccine works well in teens.
- Planets
Signs of a hidden Planet Nine in our solar system may be an illusion
Hints of the remote planet, also called Planet X, relied on clumped up orbits of bodies beyond Neptune. A new study suggests that clumping doesn’t exist.
