Humans

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.

Health & Medicine

Intel STS finalist uses math to help the blind

Intel Science Talent Search finalist Alec Arshavsky has built a computer program to help make sure people receive the right eye transplants to help reverse blindness.

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.

Health & Medicine

Teen uncovers new weapons to stop Huntington’s disease

David Seong, an Intel Science Talent Search finalist, is studying how tiny pieces of genetic material might be used to lock up a dangerous protein in Huntington’s disease.

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.

Health & Medicine

Teen finds the ‘shape’ of our beating hearts

Kevin Lee used math to probe how the shape of a beating heart relates to electrical signals from the brain. He unveiled it at the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search.

Health & Medicine

Intel STS finalist finds new flu fighters

Intel Science Talent Search finalist Eric Chen used a computer simulation to narrow down chemical targets to fight influenza. The drugs that he identified could be the next big weapons against flu.

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.

Brain

Mapping the brain’s highways

A new map may explain why some brain injuries are worse than others. Even relatively minor injuries that disrupt message superhighways may have a more devastating impact than some seemingly catastrophic injuries.

Health & Medicine

When a nut allergy comes back

Eating small amounts of peanuts may help people overcome an allergy to the food. But for most people undergoing the treatment, its benefits vanish after they stop eating peanuts.

Genetics

Where Native Americans come from

All tribes seem to derive from the same Asian roots, DNA indicates.