Scientific Knowledge

A spoonful of sugar is the traditional way to help medicines ‘go down’. But getting young children to take foul-tasting medicines – even if their lives depend on it – requires more than a bit of added sweetener. According to the World Health Or…

Can skin cancer be treated with light? Scientists now believe so. They’re exploring new ways to image cancerous lesions using LEDs that might advance a technique for treating cancer called photodynamic therapy (PDT).

For the first time, scientists have been able to watch nanoparticles grow from the earliest stages of their formation. Nanoparticles are the foundation of nanotechnology and their performance depends on their structure, composition, and size. Researche…

Car drivers must be able to react quickly to hazards on the road at all times. Dashboard-mounted cameras help keep drivers alert.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused more than 200,000 casualties and devastated Haiti’s economy in January resulted not from the Enriquillo fault, as previously believed, but from slip on multiple faults — primarily a previously unknown, subsurfa…

John O’Sullivan had struggled with bipolar depression since he was a teen. He has tried numerous types of psychotherapy and medication but nothing seemed to help for long. At age 50 and desperate, O’Sullivan was cautiously intrigued when his psychiatri…

A new study strengthens emerging evidence that the act of going under anesthesia and coming out of anesthesia are distinct neurobiological processes. It also found that the parietal region of the brain may play a critical role in how anesthesia suppres…

Data from one liability insurance database in Colorado indicate that wrong-site and wrong-patient surgical and procedure errors continued to occur despite nationwide steps to help prevent them, according to a new study.

Much of medicine is based on what is considered the strongest possible evidence: The placebo-controlled trial. A new study calls into question this foundation upon which much of medicine rests, by showing that there is no standard behind the standard -…

A 15-year experiment in an outdoor “laboratory” shows that naturally colonizing wetlands can offer just as many, if not more, ecological services as will wetlands planted by humans. Researchers have been comparing the behavior of two experimental marsh…