Science

Heart attacks are as American as hot dogs and easily more common than fast-food joints. While changes in the nation's diet are slowly under way to pre-empt the disease, scientists are scrambling to find ways to treat or cure it, in the hope of reducing the swelling numbers added daily to the body co...

Every hour of TV viewing increases your chances of an early death, according to a new study by Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Every one-hour program you sit through raises your odds for dying from heart attack or stroke by 18 percent, from cancer by 9 percent, and fr...

Despite long-standing concerns about the health effects of cellphones, a new study suggests that radiation from the devices may actually have a beneficial effect when it comes to Alzheimer's disease. Specifically, long-term exposure to the electromagnetic waves associated with cellphone use may actu...

Neuroscientists at MIT have figured out how to use colored lights to temporarily quiet activity in the brain. By shining a light on a set of neurons affected by a gene-enhanced virus tool, they were able to shut those neurons down. When they turned off the lights, the neurons started right back up a...

The fight against cancer is often lost before it is even waged. Too many patients get the news too late. However, the battle may soon take a turn, as advances on the nano frontier bring more sophisticated firepower to the front lines. Latest developments include nanosensors that can detect minute am...

Early Monday morning, NASA launched a spacecraft that will map the entire sky in infrared light with more sensitivity and resolution than has ever been possible before. A Delta II rocket carrying NASA's new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Cal...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

Facebook’s Bossy, Cagey Privacy Maneuvers

In making a move meant to enhance user privacy, Facebook went about things in a kind of intrusive way this week. As you know, the site started out as a college-kids-only social network, and the content you'd find on Facebook at that time reflected the demographic in all its boozy glory. But now Face...

You couldn't find a more appropriate name for the world's first commercial spaceship, which Virgin Galactic officially unveiled to the world and the media Monday night at California's Mojave Air and Space Port. The SpaceShipTwo reusable suborbital plane is now the Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, and i...

Could heavy cellphone users be more likely to suffer brain cancer? Scientists and researchers aren't sure, but they're locked in debate. Results of a study published by Scandinavian researchers in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on Thursday indicated there doesn't seem to be any such li...

The United Nations has jumped into the controversy involving leaked emails on climate change data from the University of East Anglia, with a senior UN official saying Friday that his agency would investigate the matter. The news may prompt a new series of blog posts, tweets and emails from climate c...

MED TECH

Can Nanotech Cure Breast Cancer?

Winning the fight against cancer may end up being more of a nano-war than a surgical strike. A team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology has just successfully combined an antibody with single-walled nanotubes to create a precision search-and-destroy weapon that targets aggressiv...

The Large Hadron Collider created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, officially became the world's highest-energy particle accelerator on Monday. The enormous facility has sent two beams of protons shooting through its ring at 1.18 teraelectronvolts. It happened 10 days after s...

While Congress debates an $850 billion healthcare bill with questionable benefits, leaders in the technology industry are quietly creating products and services that will truly reform healthcare. This Thanksgiving, for example, Americans can be appreciative of the incredible price decline in genome...

Before the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, can begin to unlock the mysteries of the universe -- as physicists around the world hope it will -- it has to be taken for a series of test drives. Scientists on Monday did just that, driving protons into each other at energies approaching 5...

IBM's revelation at SC09 created quite a stir and immediately brought forth visions of Cylons and Hal 9000. The cognitive computing team at IBM Research has moved significantly forward in creating a large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data -- two major m...

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