To many people, a rock is just a rock. If anyone has been house shopping, you know how realtors will mention that the countertops are "granite" and you might wonder why, from house to house, they all look so different. Turns out (much to the chagrin of geologists in the housing market), those countertops are likely neither granite nor all the same type of rock. That's because rocks are made of different minerals and rocks get their names (mostly) from what minerals they contain.Now, much of the ...read more

If you could choose one superpower from the animal kingdom, many people might wish for the ability to breathe underwater. Marine ecosystems have long fascinated humans, leading to the development of specialized equipment and techniques to extend the time spent exploring beneath the waves. Unlike humans, marine mammals have evolved remarkable adaptations that allow them to hold their breath for extended periods, enabling them to thrive in aquatic environments.It was traditionally believed that ma ...read more

Peanuts are known to cause one of the most severe reactions in children with food allergies. Current estimates show between 2 percent and 5 percent of school-age children in the U.S. have a peanut allergy, while food allergies among children have been shown to increase for decades. Now, a promising new treatment that gradually introduces some children to store-bought peanut butter in a controlled medical setting could help treat peanut allergies, according to a recent study published in the New ...read more

Thanks to an innovative "depot” injection approach from a team at MIT, long-lasting shots could become a lot less painful. Involving the injection of tiny, drug-delivering crystals suspended within a solvent, the team’s method could deliver drugs with thinner needles, fewer injections, and a lot less pain overall.Describing the approach in a study in Nature Chemical Engineering, the team says that the method could work with contraceptives and other drugs that are taken consistently over time ...read more

Shortages of GLP-1 medications, like Ozempic and Wegovy, are common occurrences. These shortages will likely continue into the future and will make it hard for patients dealing with Type 2 diabetes and obesity to receive consistent treatment.At the most recent meeting of the American Chemical Association, a research team presented their findings that could solve the GLP-1 shortage. They suggest that an improvement in GLP-1 drug delivery, a process they call “painting,” could reduce the amoun ...read more

As concerns over Earth’s limited resources continue to grow, some entrepreneurs are eagerly looking beyond our planet to establish the next big business venture: asteroid mining. The prospect of setting up mining operations in space holds the potential for enticing rewards of rare metals that can’t be easily found on Earth.However, these projects face an uphill climb. Asteroid mining missions may cost upwards of billions of dollars, and the technology they’d need to rely on requires furthe ...read more

Before his discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, it’s rumored that Howard Cater, the renowned Egyptologist, discovered another mummy in 1919. Known as either the Bashiri Mummy, the Mummy of Pacheri, or the “untouchable one,” this mummy was so intricately wrapped that researchers never unfurled it for fear of irreversible damage. The fabric across the mummy's face is woven in an intricate pattern that resembles the base of a pyramid, and it may be the only known mummy to have use ...read more

Tuberculosis (TB) is mostly forgotten, but certainly not gone. We often associate TB with bygone times. In 1882, the consumption, as it was often called then, killed one in seven people in Europe and the U.S. The disease traveled by coughing; crowded cities in both Europe and the U.S. were thought to be one reason behind its rise. In the Victorian Era, wealthy folks travelled to remote, temperate climates to avoid TB, but people with less resources hacked up blood as their lungs deteriorated, un ...read more

It’s a rite of passage that fills men of a certain age with dread: the digital exam for prostate cancer. But suffering prostate cancer is even worse — especially since the treatments come with the chance that the patient will experience either erectile dysfunction (ED) or urinary incontinence.A new surgical approach now reduces the odds of those unwanted side effects, according to a report in The Lancet. A robot-assisted surgical method shows it can spare the periprostatic neurovascular bund ...read more

Back in 1832, the celebrated British physicist, Michael Faraday, carried out a set of experiments designed to answer a tantalizing question: could electricity be generated by Earth's rotation through its own magnetic field? The intriguing possibility arises because Earth’s magnetic field does not rotate with the Earth like a physical object. Instead, it is created at each instant and remains essentially fixed in space. So the thinking at the time was that perhaps Earth’s movement through it ...read more