At the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, physicists shoot protons around a 17-mile track and smash them together at nearly the speed of light. It’s one of the most finely tuned scientific experiments in the world, but when trying to make sense of the quantum debris, physicists begin with a strikingly simple tool called a Feynman diagram that’s not that different from how a child would depict the situation.
With a new presidential administration promising to review its human spaceflight activities, NASA on Thursday continued to signal a willingness to consider alternatives to its exploration systems—the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and related ground systems developed at Kennedy Space Center to support their launch later this decade and in the 2020s.
Exposure to smartphone screens is associated with lower sleep quality, according to a study published November 9, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Matthew Christensen from the University of California, San Francisco, USA, and colleagues.
Smartphones are increasingly becoming part of everyday life, but questions remain about the effects of frequent use on sleep. Poor sleep is associated with health conditions such as obesity, diabetes and depression.
Building on more than 30 years of air quality research in some of the most polluted urban environments on Earth, a team of atmospheric scientists at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) have turned their attention toward the growing e-cigarette industry and the unidentified effects of vaping on human health.
“I don’t mean to be morbid,” Eric Dishman told a friend as he was winding down his job at Intel. “But this may be the last time you see me.” Dishman, a longtime leader of the company’s health research division, was preparing to die. The kidney cancer he’d been diagnosed with in college had caught up to him two decades later. His kidneys had failed, and the chemo drug that kept him alive was incompatible with dialysis.
When scientists finished sequencing the human genome in 2003, many researchers focused their attention on decoding the long strings of As, Ts, Gs and Cs as the way to understanding the mysteries of human genetics. The genome, however, doesn’t appear in nature as a simple long line of letters. Unfurled, the genome stretches for nearly two meters, yet it folds itself in coils and loops to fit inside a nucleus less than 10 microns in diameter.
A damning myth about the origins of HIV in North America spun out of a single “ambiguous oval,” according to the authors of a new genetic study on the virus.
When he delivered his Mars colonization presentation at the International Astronautical Conference in September, SpaceX founder Elon Musk spent a lot of time discussing the Interplanetary Transport System rocket and spacecraft, But he offered precious little information about what the firsts visitors' life on Mars would look like.
IBM announced Monday that it's partnering with Quest Diagnostics to advance precision medicine in the treatment of cancer across the US.
Nanoparticles come in many shapes and sizes, including spheres, chains, reefs, and boxes, and more. When it comes to drug delivery, however, rods and worms are the most effective forms, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Though the field of medical nanotech is still in its infancy, nanoparticles are already being used by doctors to overcome biological barriers, navigate cellular environments, and deliver anticancer drugs and vaccines deep into our bodies.
