Bulky kitchen gadgets like slow cookers and pressure cookers take up a lot of space. Many people might wonder if owning so many glorified pots is worthwhile.
A cranberry, honey or a candy bar—which tastes the sweetest? These foods contain sugars that humans can perceive differently. A cranberry seems tart, whereas a candy bar can be excessively sweet, and honey is somewhere ...
In the six years since its inception, CRISPR gene editing has experienced ups and downs, from giddy excitement over the technology's potential to cure genetic diseases to patent disputes, ethical considerations and cancer ...
For many Americans, highly processed foods are on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Even when the raw materials—grains, for example—are high in vitamins and health-promoting phenolic compounds, processing can ...
A man and a woman were found unconscious in Wiltshire, England, on July, after having been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok. The woman has now died while the man is in critical condition. This is the same substance that ...
The drug overdose epidemic currently gripping the nation is so tenacious in part because it's being driven by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that comes in many forms. Each form has a slightly different chemical structure, and ...
In a previous video, the Reactions team attempted to demonstrate the color-changing science of hydrangeas by using aluminum citrate to try to turn cut flowers from red to blue.
In 2016, three physicists received the Nobel Prize for using the mathematical concept of "topology" to explain the strange behavior of certain materials—for example, those that are insulators in their bulk but conductors ...
Bananas are one of the world's most popular fruits. But how they're stored prior to reaching grocery shelves can adversely affect their flavor and smell. Now in a study appearing in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, ...
Art curators will be able to recover images on daguerreotypes, the earliest form of photography that used silver plates, after a team of scientists led by Western University learned how to use light to see through degradation ...
Savvy gardeners know that they can adjust the color of hydrangea blossoms between pink and blue by altering the pH of the soil. But pH isn't the entire story.
Are you breathing air molecules that were once exhaled by Caesar, Joan of Arc or Madame Curie? And why did Albert Einstein try to break into the refrigerator business?
As retailers move to stop selling paint strippers that contain two potentially hazardous chemicals, a Purdue University chemist has some words of caution for those who continue to use this type of product.
Chameleons are nature's most talented masters of color. They use their unique color-changing abilities for all sorts of reasons. But how do they alter their hue?
Not long ago, cannabis growers learned their trade mainly by trial and error, passing along tips to others behind a veil of secrecy. But with expanding legalization of cannabis in the U.S., this situation is changing. According ...
For consumers trying to avoid plastics and go "green," solid body wash sold without packaging seems to be a good alternative to wrapped and bottled soaps. But as an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly ...
Researchers from the Quadram Institute have developed a new technique to distinguish between superior Arabica coffee and cheaper, lower quality Robusta.
Food fraud, where different or low-quality food is deliberately mislabelled and sold as high-quality goods, risks the health of consumers as well as the economic viability of producers and manufacturers. To combat this, researchers ...
Melatonin is a widely used supplement. Many people turn to the hormone hoping it will improve their sleep, but do claims of its efficacy have any merit?
In this story of wine and smoke taint, everyone knows "whodunit"—it's the smoke from wildfires. But it's the "how" that's got researchers and winemakers stymied. According to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ...
Discerning drinkers may soon be able to branch out after Japanese researchers said Tuesday they have invented a way of producing an alcoholic drink made from wood.
Scientists at two major national laboratories have demonstrated a new method for testing explosives stored in weapons stockpiles, a step they say will help reduce accidental detonation and ensure the weapons perform as expected.
Normally, something blowing up in your face is bad. But in the event of a vehicle accident, and in conjunction with a seatbelt, one particular explosion could very well save your life. It's the chemical reaction that inflates ...
Bacteria traveling along "fungal highways" on cheese rinds can spread more quickly and ruin quality or cause foodborne illnesses, but cheesemakers could manipulate the same highways to help cheese mature faster and taste ...
Last year Empa's inorganic analytics lab was granted the status of "Reference Laboratory" within the scope of the ProSUM project, funded by the EU. Fine-grained samples of shredder waste from scrapped cars, e-waste or mine ...
Declining prices and a saturated market could spell doom-and-gloom for the generic pharmaceutical industry, but some in the business are turning lemons into lemonade, seeing opportunities instead. According to an article ...
Methane hydrate is a crystalline complex of water and methane that forms beneath the ocean floor. It resembles regular ice, but it can easily be set aflame after it's brought to the surface.
As people in the developing countries become more affluent, they end up buying more plastics. But these areas often don't have good waste management procedures in place, so a lot of that plastic eventually ends up in the ...
We know fuels like gasoline and alcohol can burn. But sometimes, when the conditions are just right, a hand-held container of fuel being poured near an ignition source can shoot out a ten-foot jet of flame. Flame jetting ...
Two University of Delaware students put their best foot forward at this year's National Sustainable Design Expo, showing off a biodegradable shoe they fashioned using mushrooms, chicken feathers and textile waste.
"Dead men tell no tales" is a common saying, but according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the old proteins on historical artifacts, such as manuscripts ...
Manipulating the temperature and the length of time under which cocoa beans are roasted can simultaneously preserve and even boost the potency of some bioactive and antioxidant compounds while protecting desired sensory aspects ...
Side effects from drugs working in non-target locations within the body can cause debilitating symptoms, often resulting in patients stopping their course of treatment early. But according to an article in Chemical & Engineering ...
Researchers from the University of Extremadura (Spain) have developed a methodology to learn the properties of hams and whole loins using magnetic resonance imaging, the same non-invasive technique used in medicine. The method ...
Ordinary sound waves—small oscillations of density—can propagate through all fluids, causing the molecules in the fluid to compress at regular intervals. Now physicists have theoretically shown that in one-dimensional ...
The hormone cortisol rises and falls naturally throughout the day and can spike in response to stress, but current methods for measuring cortisol levels require waiting several days for results from a lab. By the time a person ...
A team of researchers from the Max-Planck Institute and Queen's University has used new information to test a theory that suggests a rogue star passed close enough to our solar system millions of years ago to change its configuration. ...
The bad news: Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa—totaling a staggering 2 to 9 trillion pounds worldwide—has been almost a biblical plague on Texas and much of the Southern United States in recent weeks. The good news: ...
Early on an August morning, the sky near Cape Canaveral, Florida, will light up with the launch of Parker Solar Probe. No earlier than Aug. 6, 2018, a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy will thunder to space carrying the ...
The basic quanta of light (photon) and sound (phonon) are bosonic particles that largely obey similar rules and are in general very good analogs of one another. Physicists have explored this analogy in recent experimental ...
Dark matter halos are theoretical bodies inside which galaxies are suspended; the halo's mass dominates the total mass. These halos cannot be observed directly, but astronomers infer their presence by the phenomenon of gravity ...
An international team of researchers has found that new particle formation (NPF) can occur in the atmosphere even in heavily polluted air. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes air quality testing ...
Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter unveiled plans Friday to make it easier for users to take their personal data and leave one online service for another.
New findings, published in the journal Astrobiology, suggest that large craters are the prime locations in which to find the building blocks of life on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Researchers at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and GRAIN have released a report titled "Emissions impossible – How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet." The report is a discussion regarding an analysis ...
For the first time, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and five other organizations have shown that human influences significantly impact the size of the seasonal cycle of temperature in the lowest ...
Watch a movie backwards and you'll likely get confused—but a quantum computer wouldn't. That's the conclusion of researcher Mile Gu at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and ...
When historian Rowan Dorin first stepped onto the Stanford campus in early 2017, he made it a habit to visit Green Library every week to dig through its collection of medieval documents and objects.
In a perspective published in the July 20 issue of Science, Neal Stewart and his University of Tennessee coauthors explore the future of houseplants as aesthetically pleasing and functional sirens of home health.
In 2012, environmental systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast—part of an effort to study genetic diversity in various marine species ...
UC San Francisco scientists have used a high-throughput CRISPR-based technique to rapidly map the functions of nearly 500 genes in human cells, many of them never before studied in detail.
Named for the mythical god with two faces, Janus membranes—double-sided membranes that serve as gatekeepers between two substances—have emerged as a material with potential industrial uses. Creating two distinct "faces" ...
The idea of bacteria as diverse, complex perceptive entities that can hunt prey in packs, remember past experiences and interact with the moods and perceptions of their human hosts sounds like the plot of some low-budget ...
Many animals rely on vision to detect, locate, and track moving objects. Male Drosophila fruit flies primarily use visual cues to stay close to a female and to direct their courtship song towards her. Scientists from the ...
Scientists at the Mainz University Medical Center and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) have developed a new method to enable miniature drug-filled nanocarriers to dock on to immune cells, which in turn ...
Researchers from The University of Western Australia and the Australian National University have uncovered new evidence that suggests dingoes arrived in Australia between 3,348 and 3,081 years ago, more recently than previously ...
A Purdue University study has mapped a complex series of pathways that control the shape of plant cells. The findings are an important step toward customizing how plants grow to suit particular agronomic needs and improving ...
Cells curb the amount of specific proteins at any desired time via the control of mRNA degradation. As mRNA nucleotides tail plays a role in this process, biologists at the Center for RNA Research, within the Institute for ...
An international team of scientists has discovered a new, exotic form of insulating material with a metallic surface that could enable more efficient electronics or even quantum computing. The researchers developed a new ...
The properties of a solid depend on the arrangement of its atoms, which form a periodic crystal structure. At the nanoscale, arrangements that break this periodic structure can drastically alter the behavior of the material, ...
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