Scary antibiotic-resistant infections aren’t just lurking in the hospital anymore. They’re in gyms, at the beach, and increasingly, on the farm. One strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) known as CC398 has been rapidly spreading through poultry and pig farms, infecting people who work with the animals around the world (up to 26.5 percent of [...]

The shift from fragile, bulky vacuum tubes to solid-state transistors paved the way for the information age. And the steady downsizing of transistors has made the devices of the information age ubiquitous, thanks to processors that become smaller, cheaper and faster with each passing year. Now a group of physicists has demonstrated how far that [...]

The number of people who die from HIV-related causes each year in the U.S. is now down to about 12,700—from a peak of more than 50,000 in the mid-1990s—thanks to condom education and distribution campaigns, increased testing and improved treatments. But now a different infectious disease is quietly killing even more people than HIV is: [...]

VANCOUVER—Resistance to hydraulic fracturing in the U.S. has risen steadily in recent months. Citizens and politicians are worried that fracking deep shales to extract natural gas can contaminate groundwater, trigger earthquakes and release methane, the potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. But a panel of experts not tied to industry told a large audience at [...]

If you ever wondered how your body handled all those packaged ramen noodles you ate during college, this video’s for you. Stefani Bardin, a TEDxManhattan fellow, wants to learn how digestion differs between food chock full of preservatives and food that can actually go bad in a day. To create this video, she and her [...]

VANCOUVER—Last fall, the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shut down for good. The long-running accelerator had been eclipsed by the vastly more powerful Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, which since 2010 has been generating data at an impressive rate. The move appeared to quash any hopes that Fermilab had of discovering the Higgs [...]

One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple undertakes a procedure to [...]

A killer cancer that is threatening to wipe Tasmanian devils off the map for good has been spreading—from an original infected female 15 years ago—via live cancer cells, according to evidence from genome sequences of the cancer and the animal, published online Thursday in Cell. Finding out how this happened could help save this species [...]

Back in December 2011, The Guardian USA and New York University’s Studio20 (see their Tumblr – note: I am associated with the program) announced a new joint project – US presidential election 2012: the citizens agenda. Here is some background information from that time: The Guardian USA: The citizens agenda: making election coverage more useful: [...]

An ant colony, made up of many thousands of individuals, actually functions more like one giant organism. Ants use their unified strength to build bridges, raft across rivers and even wage war on neighboring colonies (as scientist Mark Moffett explains in a recent Scientific American feature). But what if you want to study the behavior [...]