How the decades-long conflict led to today's increasingly impotent antibiotics. When the World Health Organization issued a report last February highlighting the antibiotic-resistant pathogens that posed the gravest public health threats, it capped a disheartening year. A powerful variety of E. coli reached American shores, and a Nevada woman died of an infection untreatable by available antibiotics. While it’s not time to panic, the stakes are high. The U.S. sees about 2 million resi ...read more

How neural stem cells repair damage from strokes, spinal injuries and aging. Kris Boesen’s life changed in an instant. In March 2016, he was driving down a winding road in his Nissan 350Z in Maricopa, a tiny hamlet in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Suddenly, the car fishtailed on the wet street, hit a tree and ricocheted into a telephone pole, crushing the vehicle and knocking Boesen unconscious. When he woke up in the hospital two days later, Boesen was paralyzed from the nec ...read more

Connected devices make our lives easier — and more vulnerable. We need white hats more than ever. One winter morning in 2015, as he left for work from his home in Silver Spring, Md., Jonathan Margulies pushed the button on his remote to close his garage door. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. The motor was shot. He ended up replacing it with a “smart” opener that not only lifted and lowered the door, but also connected to the internet. With a swipe on a smartphone ...read more

Tackling a migration enigma, scientists are getting a grip on where these slithery fishes call home. Johannes Schmidt spent 25 years chasing an enigmatic fish across the Atlantic Ocean. The Danish biologist surrendered the hunt only after his ship was torn to pieces on a Caribbean coral reef. Schmidt was trying to solve an ancient mystery about one of nature’s strangest fish: eels. Aristotle suggested the slithering species emerged spontaneously from the earth. But by the early 1900s, ...read more

The Inka Empire ruled millions without a written language. Keeping records was a knotty situation. High in the Peruvian Andes, in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, sits a wooden box that’s sacred to the locals who keep close guard over it. It contains 487 cords of twisted and dyed animal fibers that, according to its caretakers, encode messages planning an 18th-century rebellion. Anthropologist Sabine Hyland was invited by community members to study the strings — the fi ...read more

The decrease in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests researchers observed in a pilot study of the Portland, Ore., area after the Affordable Care Act went into effect. Only middle-aged Portlanders, 45-64 years old, saw this benefit, though — the nearly universally insured elderly population, 65+, saw no changes. How often men should knock boots weekly to potentially reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. Doing the dirty deed seems to lower blood levels of homocysteine, an amino ac ...read more

A scientist creates a crowdfunding platform for other researchers. Like many undergrads in science fields, Cindy Wu was intrigued by an academic career in research. After the biology major graduated in 2011, she worked as a research assistant at the University of Washington in Seattle, her alma mater. While there, she wanted to repurpose a treatment for anthrax to help clear up staph infections, but wasn’t sure how to get money for her idea. When she approached her adviser about it, W ...read more

(Credit: John Carnemolla/Shutterstock) If you want to get something done in an African wild dog pack, you’ve got to be ready to sneeze. The animals seem to make group decisions based on a system of explosive exhalations — “sneezes” — that determine if they get up and go on the hunt. If the dogs reach a quorum of sorts, they all fall in line — no “bless you’s” necessary. Sneeze If You’re With Me Researchers from Swansea University and ...read more

Closeup look at Hurricane Irma’s eye, acquired by the GOES-16 weather satellite. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As I’m writing this on Wednesday morning, the eye of Hurricane Irma — a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm – has passed over the islands of Barbuda, Saint Barthelemy and Saint Martin, and was shortly headed for the Virgin Islands. I shudder to think what has been happening on the ground with the storm’s maximum sustained win ...read more

Photo: flickr/Kevin Dooley There are many ways to cope with being blind, from using a cane to adopting a seeing-eye dog. But some blind people have gone a step further and developed the skill of using mouth clicks to echolocate, in the same way that bats navigate in the dark. Here, a group of engineers studied exactly how these ‘human bats’ — or ‘bat men’, if you will — echolocate. They found that the clicks are very short (~3 milliseconds) and the freq ...read more