News: Chemical Cocktail on Mars Makes Microbial Life There Unlikely
A new study casts real suspicion on the possibility of life on Mars. Why? It seems the surface of the planet may be downright uninhabitable for microbial life as we know it.
A new study casts real suspicion on the possibility of life on Mars. Why? It seems the surface of the planet may be downright uninhabitable for microbial life as we know it.
Coronaviruses are common viruses, and most of us catch one at some point — they cause about 30% of all common colds. A new accidental discovery could help fight these viruses, even the deadlier, emerging ones.
The search is on to find antibiotics that will work against superbugs — bacteria that are rapidly becoming resistant to many drugs in our antibiotic arsenal.
People who have heart disease get shingles more often than others, and the reason has eluded scientists since they first discovered the link. A new study has found a connection, and it lies in a defective white cell with a sweet tooth.
Snapchat recently updated their Android and iPhone apps with a new feature called Snap Map which lets you share your current location with other Snapchatters, as well as see their current locations. It may sound like an interesting new feature, but sharing your exact location with all of your Snapchat followers is dangerous, to say the least. Luckily, it's easy to turn this feature off.
As summer heats up, new maps from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gives us our best guess at where Zika-carrying mosquitoes could be hanging out this year in the US.
While restaurants and classrooms have enacted policies banning cell phones, one father has had enough of his kids' obsessive phone habits. Dr. Tim Farnum is now seeking to ban the sale of smartphones to children under 13.
Legionnaires' disease is named after 1976 outbreak in Philadelphia that sickened 221 people and killed 34. More often striking adults over the age of 50, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported two cases where newborns contracted the often fatal disease — at their moment of birth.
Even before we are born, our immune system is hard at work. New research shows how the developing fetal immune system takes advantage of the time and opportunity of gestation — in the presence of mom's cells and tissues — to develop a sense of self.
Mosquitoes are a big problem, and citronella candles are not the solution. There are a lot of mosquito species. The American Mosquito Control Association reports there are more than 3000 mosquito species in the world, and about 200 of those occur in the US. The most common are the Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex species. These are also the three mosquito species most likely to transmit serious illness, and all of them live in the US.
Intense exercise can cause problems with our digestive tract. It even has a name — "Exercise-induced Gastrointestinal Syndrome." Simply put, strenuous exercise can damage the gut and let the bacteria that reside there potentially pass into the bloodstream.
Dengue fever is a danger to anyone living or visiting tropical or subtropical regions. It can be hard to detect the infection in its earliest and most treatable phase, especially in children. Luckily, new research highlights better techniques for triaging the disease in infected children with more severe symptoms, potentially saving lives.
As researchers from Yale searched our environment for compounds to aid in the battle against drug-resistant bacteria, they got an unlikely assist from ticks.
As headlines focus on melting glaciers and rising water levels caused by global warming, climate change is quietly taking its toll on the nearly invisible occupants of this planet, the microbes.
The bacteria Klebsiella pneumoniae is a bad actor known for being antibiotic-resistant and causing a variety of serious infections in hospitals, including pneumonia, surgical site wounds, and meningitis. K. pneumoniae is something you do not want to encounter if you have a compromised immune system.
For many of us, pets are important family members. They give us loyalty, companionship, and comfort. Now, researchers have given us another reason to welcome them into the family: Babies from families with furry pets — the majority of which were dogs — had higher levels of two types of beneficial gut bacteria.
The noses of kids who live in areas of intense pig farming may harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria, presumably acquired from the animals, according to a new study by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, published in Environmental Health Perspectives.
While at work, you notice your gloves changing color, and you know immediately that you've come in contact with dangerous chemicals. Bandages on a patient signal the presence of unseen, drug-resistant microbes. These are ideas that might have once seemed futuristic but are becoming a reality as researchers move forward with technology to use living bacteria in cloth to detect pathogens, pollutants, and particulates that endanger our lives.
Devastating and deadly, land mines are a persistent threat in many areas of the world. Funding to clear regions of land mines has been decreasing, but new research may offer a less dangerous method of locating hidden, underground explosives by using glowing bacteria.
The theme for 2017's World Malaria Day, which is today, April 25, is "End Malaria for Good." For many Americans, this might seem like an odd plea. Especially since Malaria is seemingly an obsolete problem here. However, on World Malaria Day, it's important to remember the danger of malaria is still very much present in the US. And around the world, the disease is at the epicenter of a global crisis.
Well, well, well. Uber, we knew you were investing a ton of money into creating self-driving taxis and flying cars, but what we didn't know is that you were already testing out your driverless vehicles on the streets of New York City.
The ability of one microbe to adapt is giving it a whole new career as a sexually transmitted disease. Usually content with the back of the throat and nose of those who carry it, the dangerous pathogen Neisseria meningitidis has adapted to cause an illness that looks a lot like gonorrhea.
It's about time people acknowledged that judging drug users would do nothing productive to help them. In the US this week, two new programs are launching that should help addicts be a little safer: Walgreens Healthcare Clinic will begin offering to test for HIV and hepatitis C next week, and Las Vegas is set to introduce clean syringe vending machines to stop infections from dirty needles.
Our quest to find new antibiotics has taken a turn — a turn down the road, that is. A team of scientists from the University of Oklahoma is scooping up roadkill and searching for bacteria on them that might yield the world's next antibiotic.
Facebook really wants us to use Messenger. For the most part, they've succeeded; theirs is one of the most popular messaging apps right now. And with yesterday's announcement of new features, Facebook is only going to make their flagship chat application better.
Sophisticated hackers have been exploiting vulnerabilities in Chrome and Firefox to trick even the most careful internet users into logging into fake domains for sites like Apple, Google, and Amazon.
Viral infections have been the focus of attention in the development of autoimmune diseases—diseases where the body's immune system reacts to the body's own cells—because they trigger the immune system into action.
The squiggly guys in this article's cover image are Propionibacterium acnes. These bacteria live in low-oxygen conditions at the base of hair follicles all over your body. They mind their own business, eating cellular debris and sebum, the oily stuff secreted by sebaceous glands that help keep things moisturized. Everybody has P. acnes bacteria—which are commonly blamed for causing acne—but researchers took a bigger view and discovered P. acnes may also play a part in keeping your skin clear.
An advance in the race to stop birth defects caused by Zika-infected mothers has been made by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. They have identified the process Zika uses to gain entry into the placenta, and published their findings in the journal Biochemistry.
Growing populations and higher temperatures put pressure on world food supplies. Naturally occurring soil bacteria may save crops in drought-stressed areas, put more land into crop production, and produce more food.
When we talk about driverless technology, the go-to companies are usually Waymo, Uber, or Tesla. However, traditional automakers like Ford and GM are also staking claims to the driverless and advanced driver assistance spaces.
The search for a cancer treatment that selectively finds and kills only the cancerous cells has just made a giant leap forward.
Before many games make it to the US-based iOS App Store, they get "soft launched" in a smaller country to get real-world testing for bugs. It's a pilot program, so to speak, as countries like Vietnam or the Philippines have far fewer iPhone users than the US, thus offer a more controlled environment for developers to get feedback and zero-in on issues that may occur in a game's early development phases.
In the past, infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) commonly led to dementia as the virus made its way to the brain. Even in effectively treated people, HIV can hide out and replicate in places like the brain, where it's tough to detect. That's why it's very concerning that half of all HIV-infected patients still report cognitive problems.
For regions that experienced a boom in mouse populations last year, scientists say 2017 could see a surge in cases of Lyme disease.
A new study confirms that antibiotics can prevent surgical intervention if your child's appendix becomes inflamed, potentially saving his or her life.
A virtual design and construction services firm has built an augmented reality application that uses the Microsoft HoloLens to improve the efficiency of quality control on construction sites.
This month, Iowa issued their first hepatitis C virus epidemiological profile and the news was not good. The number of cases of hepatitis C reported in Iowa between 2000 and 2015 rose nearly threefold, from 754 cases in 2000 to 2,235 cases in 2015.
Maternal infection with genital herpes, or other pathogens, during early pregnancy could increase risk of autism, or other neurodevelopmental disorders, says a new study.
Even if your cat drives you a little nuts, don't worry, because a new study says that cats pose no risk to your mental health.