Engineering Design
- Tech
Making cents of sounds
Some people give up when a vending machine rejects their money. But one student decided to turn his frustration into inspiration. Through research, he showed how to identify coins by the sounds they make.
- Health & Medicine
Bones: Custom cushioning helps heal a bad break
If the stiff casts encasing broken limbs included an inflatable air bladder instead of a soft lining, costly and painful complications experienced by some patients during healing might be avoided, two teens reported at the 2015 Intel ISEF competition.
- Brain
Hands-free but still distracted
When people aren’t distracted, they can see a traffic light change very quickly. But a teen scientist now shows that texting — even with a hands-free device — gets dangerously slow.
- Animals
What’s the buzz? A new mosquito lure
Broadcasting a fake buzz can lure male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes away from females. That could reduce populations of these annoying — and disease-causing — insects, reports a teen at the 2015 Intel ISEF competition.
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Cookie Science 16: If I had to do it all again
My second cookie experiment didn’t turn out quite like I planned. Here’s what I would do differently, knowing what I do now.
- Chemistry
Cool Jobs: Saving precious objects
Museum conservators are experts at protecting and restoring precious objects. Along with art or history, many also have studied chemistry, physics, archaeology or other scientific fields.
- Health & Medicine
Injected nanoparticles treat internal wounds
Soldiers wounded in a bombing could be treated with a shot of specially designed nanoparticles that stop bleeding and inflammation in the lungs.
- Tech
Cool Jobs: Big future for super small science
Scientists using nanotechnology grow super-small but very useful tubes with walls no more than a few carbon atoms thick. Find out why as we meet three scientists behind this huge new movement in nanoscience.
- Physics
News Brief: As timely as it gets
A newly modified atomic clock won’t lose or gain a second for 15 billion years. This timepiece is about three times more precise than an earlier version.
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Cookie Science 15: Results aren’t always sweet
From my latest experiment, I now know how to make a cookie that my friend can enjoy. But here’s a puzzle: I could not repeat some results from my first set of tests.
- Agriculture
Ditching farm pollution — literally
An Indiana project shows how fighting fertilizer runoff can save farmers money, protect wild habitats and prevent harmful algae blooms.
- Space
Mini-sats: The trick to spying Earth-bound asteroids?
NASA is supposed to begin nonstop screening by 2020 for all asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. Some astronomers now think the only way to affordably meet that deadline is by using mini-satellites
