A large gallstone. (Credit: eleonimages/Shutterstock)
Up to 25 million Americans suffer from gallstones. The unwanted pebbles form in the gallbladder and can grow to be as large as a golf ball. They can block bile ducts and cause severe abdominal pain, infection and even death.
For decades, doctors have known they appear when excess cholesterol and calcium salts accumulate in the bile — a yellowish-brown liquid that helps the small intestine break down lipids. What holds the particl ...read more
Most Mars landers or rovers use parachutes as part of their landing procedure, but Mars’ thin atmosphere makes even this low-tech approach a perilous one. (Credit: ESA/ATG medialab)
ExoMars is a planned mission to Mars set to launch in the summer of 2020. But a recent series of parachute test failures may threaten that launch date.
ExoMars is being built by a joint operation between the European and Russian space agencies (ESA and Roscosmos). It was designed as a two-part mission, t ...read more
Increasing numbers of drones in urban areas means air traffic control is needed. (Credit: Volodymyr Goinyk/Shutterstock)
Highways in the sky are one step closer to becoming reality as NASA conducts the final planned tests of its traffic management system for unmanned drones in Corpus Christi, Texas this week. The system would act like air traffic control for drones, tracking them to help avoid collisions and ensure smooth flight paths.
Testing the cloud-based system’s capabilities in ...read more
Less moisture in the atmosphere means plants grow more slowly. (Credit: OhEngine/Shutterstock)
Water shortage troubles are common in the arid West and South Africa. But they’re not the only places enduring dry spells. In a new study today, scientists say the atmosphere itself is suffering from a major drought. The lack of moisture in the air is sucking water from dirt and plants, leading to reduced crop yields and impaired plant growth worldwide, and likely adding to global warming.
...read more
(Credit: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock)
Children with autism have a hard time interacting with others. Although they may find people fascinating, they struggle with talking and relating to others. Many autistic kids have trouble adapting when routines change and struggle with anxiety.
Now researchers find an inability to predict the future may be the source of anxiety in children with autism. The results hint that many traits of autism such as the desire for sameness and repetitive behaviors ...read more
Asteroids may have stopped pummeling Earth some 600 million years earlier than scientists thought, giving life that much more time to evolve. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The solar system once experienced a meteor shower of epic proportions: Asteroids whizzed around the inner planets, crashing down in a rain of fire that left their surfaces scarred for billions of years. Astronomers typically call this period the Late Heavy Bombardment.
But exactly when that fiery assault happened has been ...read more
A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man and child at Vienna's Natural History Museum. (Credit: Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia Commons
Being a lifelong surfer or diver sometimes comes with an odd side-effect: the growth of small, bony knobs in the ear canals, the result of chronic exposure to cold water and air.
They're often referred to as "surfer's ear" because the condition is common among those who ride the waves. But there might well be a more apt term for the condition, based on new finding ...read more
Graphite, an allotrope of carbon. (Credit: Miriam Doerr Martin Frommherz/Shutterstock)
Carbon is, all things considered, pretty great. Its position on the periodic table of elements — which symbolizes the amount of spare electrons it has, more or less — allows it to form an incredible variety of molecules. This includes allotropes, the different forms an element can take on its own based on its structure. Diamond, coal and graphene are all just varieties of carbon.
But that&rs ...read more
A fecal transplant capsule from OpenBiome. (Credit: Erik Jacobs)
Mark Smith dares you to come up with a fecal joke he hasn’t heard. It’s not your typical industry parlance, but when you’re in the business of transplanting the stuff, it helps to have a sense of humor about it. “I think we’ve gone through just about every poop pun under the sun,” says Smith, who makes a living reallocating the contents of people’s bowels.
He’s the co-founder a ...read more
Much of our genome has no apparent purpose. Is it so-called "junk DNA" or do we simply not understand it? (Credit: ktsdesign/Shutterstock)
Would
you purchase a book with over 98 percent of the text written in gibberish?
Biology has no business in the book industry, yet it still writes a pretty
fascinating guidebook: DNA. Our genetic manual holds the instructions for the proteins
that make up and power our bodies. But less than 2 percent of our DNA actually
codes for them.
The
rest — ...read more
