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.
Warning: If you are eating and for some reason still decided to click on this article, turn around now. Maui, Hawaii health officials have reported finding at least six cases of angiostrongyliasis, a parasitic lungworm that infects humans. Colloquially, it's known as rat lungworm disease. And if you think that name is awful, just wait until you hear what it does to the human body.
To keep fungal pathogens at bay in their crowded homes, wood ants mix potions to create powerful protection for their nest and their young.
Uber's driverless cabs began picking people up in Arizona in February, after its attempt at a pilot test in San Francisco. Now, one of these cars has been in an accident, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Bats are an important part of the US economy. They devour metric tons of bugs every night that would otherwise ravage crops and also be generally disgusting-looking and make you itchy. But they're in danger from a nasty fungal infection called white-nose syndrome, which has just popped up in Texas and has been spreading across the country.
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but one annoying invasive weed may hold the answer to treating the superbug MRSA. Researchers from Emory University have found that the red berries of the Brazilian peppertree contain a compound that turns off a gene vital to the drug-resistance process.
Seagrass may help your favorite beach stay a little less toxic. A new study, led by Joleah Lamb, a postdoctoral researcher in the Harvell Lab at Cornell University, found that coastal seagrasses reduce levels of pathogens dangerous to humans and marine organisms in near-shore waters.
Disengagement report numbers for self-driving car testing in 2016 on public roads in California were just released, and the biggest point we can make about them is that Waymo is very far ahead of their competitors in almost every metric.
A recent pathogen outbreak in Illinois is just one of many outbreaks of an underappreciated, but serious, viral infection passed from rodents to humans. These hantaviruses have been cropping up more frequently in the last decade or so, giving us more reason to clean out our dusty attics, basements, and garages.
Exposed to hormones, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals, the beautiful wild fish in Canada's Grand River have taken on some pretty odd characteristics—they're turning into females. A long-term study suggests using bacteria to manage polluted water could turn the tide for feminized fish.
Joe McKenna died when he was 30 years old. A young married man with his future ahead of him, he was cleaning up the station where he worked as a fireman. Struck by a piece of equipment fallen from a shelf, Joe complained of a sore shoulder. Over the next week, Joe worsened and ended up in the hospital. Chilled, feverish, and delirious, his organs shut down from an infection we'd now call septic shock.
When a dead body is discovered, finding out when the person died is just as important as finding out how the person died. Determining the time of death has always involved lots of complicated scientific detective work and less-than-reliable methods. However, a study by Nathan H. Lents, a molecular biologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, is the first of its kind to show how microbes colonize a body's ears and nose after death.
The story of Helicobacter pylori is a real testament to the tenacity of medical researchers to prove their hypothesis. It took decades before the scientific world would accept that the bacteria H. pylori caused ulcers.
Findings from a mouse study suggest that the Zika virus infection may have serious reproductive consequences for men.
New weapons are needed to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Instead of drugs, scientists have discovered in an animal study that they may be able to harness vampire bacteria to vanquish pneumonia.
For the past couple of years, random internet dwellers have embarked on an ambitious quest to see just how useless a box can be in hopes of earning sweet, sweet internet points. Welcome to the world of useless machines.
While maggots living in human eyeballs isn't necessarily a problem in the states, it could happen to you one day if a fly decides your warm eyeball is a suitable place for its larvae. If this rare event should happen, before you start gouging your eyeball out, remember this trick from National Geographic explorer and engineer Albert Lin and everything will be okay.
Say goodbye to the age of metal robots—C-3PO and K9 are a thing of the (future) past! Anette Hosoi, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at MIT, and her former graduate student Nadia Cheng, have created a robotic material closely resembling human skin.
On June 5th, robotics firm Aldebaran and SoftBank Corp., the Japanese giant that owns Sprint (and possibly T-Mobile), unveiled an emotion-sensing robot named Pepper.
Lately, it seems, that we live in a two-dimensional world. With smart phones and tablets constantly at our fingertips, it always seems as if we are looking into a screen.
Have you ever fallen victim to a clever Jedi mind trick? Don't worry. It happens. There are evolutionary reasons as to why our brains sometimes give into the oldest tricks in the book. Fortunately, the more you understand the tricks of a salesman, the easier it is to avoid their gripping psychological influence. Clue #1: Too Much Specificity
Video: . How to Dye Weave Extensions Easy!!
BioShock: Infinite just came out today, and some people will no doubt play the game all of the way through with the object of beating the game. Others, though, will not only want to beat the game, but will want to earn every single achievement (or trophy) possible—and the A Real Pistol achievement is one of the very first (and easiest) ones you can get. In order to complete this task, you will need to kill 25 enemies with the Broadsider Pistol. You can pick up a Broadsider Pistol in the first...
A team of scientists might have just put Jellyfish Art out of business with their new cyborg jellyfish. By arranging the heart cells of a normal rat on a piece of silicone, they've successfully created their own Franken-jellies. When in salt water with a fluctuating electrical field, the rat's heart muscles on the rubbery silicone contract the lobes downward and back up, which mimics the pulsing movement of a young moon jellyfish swimming.
3D printing has been around for a while, but until recently it was used mostly for prototyping and research. Now, with technological advancements, it seems like everyone is using 3D printers, from crime scene investigators to garage hobbyists and hackers. Below are some of the most innovative uses people have come up with so far.
NASA -- the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States government's most infamous agency, the powerhouse of space exploration -- teaches you the basics of Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion. Who better to learn motion theory from than NASA?
We've been so worried about volumetric scans possibly robbing celebrities and performers of their agency and right to control their image that, somewhere along the way, we forgot that scans may not always be necessary to produce passable holographic performances.
For Snapchat users wondering if that selfie is ready to send to their crush, independent Lens Studio creator Andrew Mendez created a handy tool called the Smile Rater.
The long and somewhat tumultuous journey of Leap Motion has come to an end, thanks to another startup.
It may sound like deja vu, but neural interface startup CTRL-labs has closed a $28 million funding round led by GV, Google's funding arm, for technology that reads user's nerve signals to interpret hand gestures.
On Sunday, Apple CEO Tim Cook (the number one person on our NR30 list) made a rare television appearance to talk about and show off his current obsession: augmented reality.
Have you ever browsed through Lenses on Snapchat and got bummed out when the app recommends that you "try this with a friend" and you're all alone? Well, now you can take AR snaps with your cat!
The transcribing app can be an invaluable tool, especially if you're a student or are in a profession that relies on audio journals or interviews. These apps can convert important recordings like lectures and meetings into text for you to carefully read through to better comprehend.
In hopes of strengthening its growing augmented reality team, Apple has reportedly hired Michael Abbott, an engineering and investment veteran with past ties to Twitter, Microsoft, Palm, and others.
As the fish farming industry struggles to become more environmentally friendly, it just gained another problem. Fish food loaded with antibiotic-resistant genes.
Whether or not a microbe is successful at establishing an infection depends both on the microbe and the host. Scientists from Duke found that a single DNA change can allow Salmonella typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, to invade cells. That single genetic variation increased the amount of cholesterol on cell membranes that Salmonella and other bacteria use as a docking station to attach to a cell to invade it. They also found that common cholesterol-lowering drugs protected zebrafi...
Newly appointed Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett admitted yesterday that demand for driverless transportation could take many different forms and that Ford was rethinking how it would tailor its cars and mobility services for self-drive modes of transportation in the future.
So cute, so furry, and so chock full of parasites. While raccoons are fun to watch, they are neither friendly nor clean — and they can make you sick in more ways than one.
Many wonder how driverless cars will ever be able to navigate through any driving condition imaginable — but the point is self-taught machines, in theory, have the innate ability to adapt to chaotic and extreme driving conditions in ways far superior to what humans are capable of.
Driverless transportation is definitely coming closer to the mainstream, but most companies developing the technology have said it will be another couple of years before we see autonomous vehicles being used as an alternative for typical transportation.
