A few months back, a new storefront appeared in my small Oregon town. Its shelves were packed with tinctures, jars of salve, coffee beans, bath bombs — even beard oil. This motley collection shared a single star ingredient: CBD. Produced by the cannabis plant, CBD is the straitlaced cousin of marijuana’s more famous component — […]
For 40 years, they’ve held the front line in Florida’s fight against mosquito-borne diseases. And it turns out that the chickens standing sentinel in cities, marshes, woodlands and residential backyards are clucking good at their job. Last year, chickens in 268 coops in over a third of Florida’s counties provided scientists weekly blood samples that […]
Black holes have been beguiling from the very beginning. Hinted at as early as the 1780s and predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they didn’t get the name we know today until the 1960s. Bizarre beasts that squash gobs of matter into infinitely dense abysses, black holes were once thought to be merely a […]
A surprise ingredient may explain how lemon juice puts the squeeze on kidney stones. Lemons contain nanoparticles that, when fed to rats, block stone formation, scientists report in the Feb. 22 Nano Letters. If the tiny sacs do the same for humans, the nanoparticles might one day offer a way to prevent kidney stones in […]
It took just a 9-volt battery and a little brain zapping to turn science writer Sally Adee into a stone-cold sharpshooter. She had flown out to California to test an experimental DARPA technology that used electric jolts to speed soldiers’ sniper training. When the juice was flowing, Adee could tell. In a desert simulation that […]
The April 25 Nepal earthquake killed more than 8,000 people and caused several billion dollars in damage, but new research suggests the toll could have been a lot worse. GPS readings taken during the quake indicate that most of the tremors vibrated through the ground as long shakes rather than quick pulses. That largely spared […]
A new atlas of human genetic diversity reveals what human ancestors’ DNA may have looked like before people migrated out of Africa. Ancestral humans carried 40.7 million more DNA base pairs than people do today, researchers report online August 6 in Science. That’s enough DNA to build a small chromosome, says study coauthor Evan Eichler, […]
A close look at one protein shows how it moves molecular passengers into cells in the kidneys, brain and elsewhere. The protein LRP2 is part of a delivery service, catching certain molecules outside a cell and ferrying them in. Now, 3-D maps of LRP2 reveal the protein’s structure and how it captures and releases molecules, […]
You’d be forgiven for thinking that depression has a simple explanation. The same mantra — that the mood disorder comes from a chemical imbalance in the brain — is repeated in doctors’ offices, medical textbooks and pharmaceutical advertisements. Those ads tell us that depression can be eased by tweaking the chemicals that are off-kilter in […]