Science News

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but they're also prized by oil drillers, road crews and experimental physicists for their unparalleled ability to bore, grind and cut. Now scientists have synthesized microscopic dia...

A new NASA spacecraft is about to embark on a 2-year mission to learn about how carbon dioxide -- a heat-trapping gas driving climate change -- cycles through the Earth's atmosphere.

For some cigarette smokers, strategies to aid quitting work well, while for many others no method seems to work. Researchers have now identified an aspect of brain activity that helps to predict the effectiveness of a re...

Researchers have found that people with lower blood levels of vitamin D were twice as likely to die prematurely as people with higher blood levels of vitamin D. The finding was based on a systematic review of 32 previous...

The first cases of mad cow disease in humans occurred in the late 1990s and are thought to be the consequence of eating contaminated beef products. Several cases of secondary infections caused by transfusions with blood ...

According to a recent CNN report, the FBI has opened a criminal investigation of the Veterans Affairs Department. Among other allegations, an internal audit of the department revealed that supervisors ordered workers to ...

Dancing eases hip and knee pain and helps older adults move better, according to a study. The findings are significant because older adults who walk too slowly are more likely to fall, become hospitalized or require care...

Populating the gastrointestinal tracts of mice with Bacteroides species producing a specific enzyme helps protect the good commensal bacteria from the harmful effects of antibiotics, researchers have found. Antibiotics a...

Men who regularly eat moderate amounts of processed red meat such as cold cuts (ham/salami) and sausage may have an increased risk of heart failure incidence and a greater risk of death from heart failure. Researchers re...

Young black adults on dialysis living in poor neighborhoods had a higher risk of dying while still young compared with all other young black and white adults, research shows. Among young adult dialysis patients living in...

Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health are studying many aspects of antibiotic resistance, including how it spreads.

A new experiment has demonstrated quantum tunneling over long distances -- a spooky effect where subatomic particles can pass through barriers.

At a time when we are still seeing subtle and not-so-subtle opposition to fostering young girls’ interest in STEM disciplines and to women’s mobility in professional science, it’s... --

In a bold move, Tesla Motors is making all the patents for the company's electric car technology free and available for anyone to use.

The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees may have begun genetically diverging from one another 13 million years ago, more than twice as long ago as had been widely thought, shedding new light on the process of human evolu...

What do the materials inside the Adidas Brazuca World Cup ball look like?

The World Cup is the most-watched sporting event on Earth, and this year's Brazuca soccer ball is a marvel of engineering.

At a little past 7:30, just as the light of the day was beginning to fade, I walked up to the tables outside the Newseum in Washington, DC. House music thumped from inside the tents erected around the door, and through t...

The term "probiotic" is misused so often that a group of experts has taken a fresh look at what probiotics really are, and examined what scientists have learned about them in recent years.

It's been known that specific proteins, called histones, must exist within a certain range -- if there are too few, a fruit fly's DNA is damaged; if there are too many, the cell dies. Now research shows that different ty...

Risk factors, pathogenic anti-dsDNA and combined activation of extracellular and intracellular TLRs, induce SLE syndromes in normal mice. Hence, ongoing studies will determine whether block anti-dsDNA, TLR4 and TLR9 can ...

Making machines solve meaningless puzzles to create bitcoins is a waste of computing power. What if the process could be tweaked to store knowledge instead?