For The Better

A new study in U.S.-born children from Spanish-speaking families finds that minority language exposure does not threaten the acquisition of English by children in the U.S. and that there is no trade-off between English and Spanish. Rather, children rel…

Engineers have devised a system for manipulating particles approaching the miniscule 2.5 nanometer diameter of DNA using sound-induced electric fields. Dubbed ‘acoustoelectronic nanotweezers,’ the approach provides a label-free, dynamically controllabl…

Machine learning algorithms do a lot for us every day — send unwanted email to our spam folder, warn us if our car is about to back into something, and give us recommendations on what TV show to watch next. Now, we are increasingly using these same al…

If you listen to songbirds, you will recognize repeated melodies or phrases. Each phrase is made up of distinct sounds, strung together. A study has found that the song phrases of many songbird species follow patterns that are similar to those used in …

As you drive down the highway, you may notice an increasing number of hybrid and electric vehicles. Alternative energy automobiles are on the rise contributing to the global effort to reduce carbon emissions. As we move together down this road, researc…

Communities surrounding the Salton Sea, the inland body of water straddling California’s Riverside and Imperial counties, show high rates of asthma due, possibly, to high aerosol dust levels resulting from the sea shrinking over time. Scientists suspec…

More than half of the structures in the contiguous United States are exposed to potentially devastating natural hazards such as floods, tornadoes and wildfires. Increasing temperatures and environmental changes contribute to this trend, according to a …

Researchers have developed a method to combine three brain-imaging techniques to more precisely capture the timing and location of brain responses to a stimulus. Their study is the first to combine the three widely used technologies – fMRI, EEG and ERO…

A potent greenhouse gas, methane is released by many sources, both human and natural. Large cities emit significant amounts of methane, but in many cases the exact emission sources are unknown. Now, researchers have conducted mobile measurements of met…

Rare-earth elements are in many everyday products, such as smart phones, LED lights and batteries. However, only a few locations have large enough deposits worth mining, resulting in global supply chain tensions. So, there’s a push toward recycling the…

Eating fruits with lunch, vegetables at dinner and a dairy snack in the evening was associated with a reduced risk of early death by cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality, according to a study of U.S. adults. Eating a Western lunch (typi…

A fair society has evolved in banded mongooses because parents don’t know which pups are their own, new research shows.

The origins of seven types of kidney cancer, including several rare subtypes, have been identified by researchers. The findings confirm that these cancers have their origin in specific forms of developmental cells present in the maturing fetus.

A new study shows that extremely low winter temperatures high in the atmosphere over the Arctic are becoming more frequent and more extreme because of climate patterns associated with global warming. The study also shows that those extreme low temperat…

With the National Eye Institute reporting that about 11 million older adults in the U.S. endure a condition that leads to progressive blindness, known as age-related macular degeneration, researchers are starting to understand what goes wrong in the di…

A new study finds geckos are fierce hunters whether or not their tails are attached to their bodies.