Believe it or not, depression can be good for your health. Ok, not that kind of depression. An economic depression. According to work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people actually got healthier during the Great Dep...
A quiet restaurant. Good wine. An animated conversation. Then, mid-sentence, you catch him steal a quick sideways downward glance at his BlackBerry. And the nickname CrackBerry comes to mind. You might think: for some, the Internet is an addiction. W...
Ever get a ringing in your ears after a loud blast of music on your iPod? Thats one example of the usually temporary condition called tinnitus, the sensation of sound even when no sound is being produced. But a new inventioncreated by high school stu...
Every year, millions of monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles to alight in one specific forest in Mexico. How do they know what direction to flutter? Scientists had thought that an insect GPS system in their brains steered them in the right dire...
For all you space buffs who like to keep track of where the water is, it looks like you can add our very own moon to your list. Because according to a trio of papers appearing in the journal Science, the lunar surface is wetter than we realized. Fort...
We all know that drinking can cloud judgment. Thats why you should never e-mail an ex after youve had a few. But for teenagers, doing dumb things now because of alcohol may be just the start. Because research with animals suggests that drinking durin...
Scary music plays a key role in ramping up the fear factor in movies. The soundtrack has such an effect that I put my hands over my ears during the most frightening moments. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University report that scary music is even scari...
Youve heard of waterboarding used as a means to get suspected terrorists to talk. Some people object to such methods on the grounds that they amount to torture. But in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, psychologist Shane OMara of Trinity Coll...
Species of plants, animals and other categories of living things are disappearing. And millions of people still live in extreme poverty. But is there a connection? For example, is the ongoing destruction of the Indonesian rainforest driven by the eco...
The early Earths oceans were home to a lot of interesting chemistry. Now scientists have found that amino acids thought to be present way back when could have been cooked into other compounds vital for lifean idea you should take with a grain of salt...
Now, heres something you dont see every day: scientists cure color-blind monkeys. According to a report published online in the journal Nature, researchers have used gene therapy to allow color-blind squirrel monkeys to look at their fruit in a whole...
If youve ever been to a hairdresser, chances are youve found yourself scrambling for things to talk about as your locks are expertly coiffed. One common topic of discussion, at least for older Americans, is their health. Which leads social scientists...
If scientists have their way, we may someday be tapping maplesnot for pancake fixins, but for power. Because researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have found theres enough electricity flowing in trees to run an electronic circuit....
We humans love to decorate things. We wear flashy clothes, tie ribbons to suitcases and personalize the cases for our iPhones. And apparently weve had this tendency for a long, long time. More than thirty-four thousand years, to be exact. Harvard res...
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], spends most of its time trying to understand and predict changes in the environment, along with conserving and managing coastal and marine resources. But its scientific expertise also just made...
