Engineering Design
- Health & Medicine
Drug-detection system could help partygoers protect themselves
Fed up with people getting unwittingly drugged at parties, a teen designed a special bracelet. It can alert drinkers to the presence of certain hidden drugs.
- Tech
This robot can wash a skyscraper’s windows
Cleaning windows on high-rise buildings can be perilous. But an Australian 12th-grader has created a robot to spare people the risk.
- Health & Medicine
Science-fair finding allows girl to sample a croissant
Some supplements claim they can help people with celiac disease, who cannot digest gluten. But do the pills work? One teen used science to find out.
- Materials Science
New black hair dye uses no harsh chemicals
Scientists have developed a new black-carbon-based hair dye. Instead of using damaging chemicals to dye hair, flexible flakes of carbon coat each strand.
- Physics
An ancient plant inspires a new lab tool
Researchers have designed a lab tool that moves liquids from one place to another by mimicking a plant called a liverwort.
- Chemistry
Hard-to-burn ‘smart’ wallpaper even triggers alarms
Scientists have made wallpaper that won’t easily burn. And embedded nanowires can be linked to a sensor to sound an alarm when the paper gets too hot.
- Chemistry
Banana plant extract can slow how fast ice cream melts
Food scientists now show that adding these tiny plant particles to ice cream may delay the rate at which this treat melts into a soupy mess.
- Chemistry
Light could make some hospital surfaces deadly to germs
A new surfacing material can disinfect itself. Room lighting turns on this germ-killing property, which could make the material attractive to hospitals.
- Animals
Cool Jobs: Diving for new medicines
Scientists mix research with underwater adventure as they search the oceans for new chemicals to treat infections, cancer and more.
- Life
This power source is shockingly eel-like
The electric eel’s powerful electric charge inspired this new squishy, water-based new approach to generating power.
- Animals
Explainer: DNA hunters
Snippets of DNA can be left behind by a passing organism. Some researchers now act as wildlife detectives to identify the sources of such cast-off DNA.
- Genetics
Explainer: Why scientists sometimes ‘knock out’ genes
How do we learn what a particular molecule does in the body? To find out, scientists often 'knock out' the gene that makes it. Here’s how.
