Health & Medicine
- Environment
Uh oh! Baby fish prefer plastic to real food
Given a choice, baby fish will eat plastic microbeads instead of real food. That plastic stunts their growth and makes them easier prey for predators.
- Health & Medicine
Heat sickness
Scientists worry that increasing temperatures could combine with air pollution to up rates of illness and premature death — perhaps dramatically.
- Animals
Eating toxic algae makes plankton speedy swimmers
After slurping up harmful algae, copepods swim fast and straight — making them easy prey for hungry predators.
- Tech
Teen offers technology that could help brain surgeons
It can reproduce plastic models of the precise faulty vessels that need fixing. Now doctors can see them, hold them and practice on them long before they pick up a scalpel.
- Health & Medicine
Common plant could help fight Zika virus
A teen discovered that extracts from leaves of the San Francisco plant (Codiaeum variegatum) kill larvae of the mosquito that helps spread the Zika and dengue fever viruses.
- Health & Medicine
Bed bugs have favorite colors
Bed bugs change their color preferences as they get older. Adults like red and black, which may help the dark bugs avoid predators.
- Tech
Control a computer with your tongue
Thousands of severely paralyzed people could venture into cyberspace with the use of this new tongue-controlled computer mouse. It was developed by a teen.
- Brain
A ‘cocktail’ in the brain can trigger sleep
A new study finds that a ‘cocktail’ of chemicals in the brain can directly cause mice to fall asleep or waken.
- Health & Medicine
Teens take home huge awards for their research
Top three prizes — adding up to $175,000 — are a small fraction of the approximately $4 million just handed out at the 2016 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
- Health & Medicine
Injured leg? Here’s a built-in footstool
Sometimes doctors advise people to keep a leg elevated, but there’s no footstool to rest it on. A teen designed a brace with a built-in kickstand.
- Brain
Eyes offer new window into Alzheimer’s disease
The eye’s retina is distinctly different in people with Alzheimer’s disease compared to those with no signs of the malady, two teens now report finding. It could lead to earlier diagnosis of the brain disease.
- Health & Medicine
Keeping samples cool without electricity
When vaccines and blood get too warm or cold, they can become useless. Two teens invented ways to keep their temperatures just right, no matter where they are.
