No limits on neurotoxic pollution by cement plants. No protecting endangered fish in San Francisco Bay. And no regulation of greenhouse gases. Those are just some of the “riders” tacked onto HR 1, the GOP spending bill defeated March 9 in the Senate but sure to return as Congress negotiates how the U.S. government will be supported. The bill would have funded the government for the remainder of... 

Making waves isn’t conducive to staying asleep, at least when the waves are a type of brain signal associated with being awake. A type of brain activity known as an alpha wave emanates from the back of the head when a person is awake but relaxing with eyes closed. Scientists used to think that the wave was subdued and disappeared as a person fell deeper and deeper into sleep. But the alpha wave... 

Radiation from a mobile phone call can make brain regions near the device burn more energy, according to a new study. Cellphones emit ultra-high-frequency radio waves during calls and data transfers, and some researchers have suspected this radiation — albeit inconclusively — of being linked to long-term health risks like brain cancer. The new brain-scan-based work, to be published Feb. 23 in... 

Researchers have discovered the first case of a direct transfer of a human DNA fragment to a bacterial genome. The guilty party? Gonorrhea. It’d been previously known that genes could transfer between different bacteria, and even between bacteria and yeast cells, but biologists at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine discovered that Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacteria responsible... 

Human eyes can detect the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement — but only sometimes, a new study on the physics preprint website arXiv.org claims. While eyes can help determine if two individual photons were recently entangled, they can’t tell if the brighter bunch of photons that actually hit the retina are in this bizarre quantum state. “In general you think these quantum phenomena that... 

A short period of fasting prior to chemotherapy may protect healthy cells but leave cancer cells vulnerable to drugs, according to a new study. The results are very preliminary, based on animal research and a case study of just 10 people. But if they hold up, doctors could have a new tool for reducing chemotherapy’s side effects and safely administering larger doses. “Side effects aren’t just,... 

The Pentagon’s scientific fringe want to fast-track the quick and easy repair of wartime wounds, by eliminating one of the most important elements of tissue engineering – and replacing it with magnetic fields. Last year, Darpa-funded researchers successfully generated human muscle tissue, and the agency requested proposals for a device that could pump out new body parts made with adult stem... 

A newly discovered mechanism of antibiotic resistance helps explain how bacteria have so quickly undermined medicine’s front-line defenses, turning miracle drugs into duds in just a few decades. Scientists have long known that exposing bacteria to the right antibiotics will kill most of them, but leave a few mutants that happen to be resistant. These mutants will go on to multiply, and eventually...