Science

You probably know the routine for drawing blood. A medical technician briefly wraps your arm in a tourniquet and looks your veins over, sometimes tapping gently with a gloved finger on your inner elbow. Then the med tech selects a target. Usually, but not always, she gets a decent vein on the first try; sometimes Continue Reading →

Intel executive says that though Moore’s Law is becoming challenging, it is by no means gone. Intel will advance Moore’s Law for the foreseeable future, but keeping up with it is becoming more challenging as chip geometries shrink, according to a company executive.  Moore’s Law is based on a theory that the number of transistors Continue Reading →

Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby had been cured of an H.I.V. infection for the first time, a startling development that could change how infected newborns are treated and sharply reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS. The baby, born in rural Mississippi, was treated aggressively with antiretroviral drugs Continue Reading →

“Where are we?” “Who did we play in the last game?” “What is the date today?” Those are some of the questions N.F.L. players are asked after they are hit in the head during a game. Next season, they are coming to an iPad. The mandatory postinjury sideline concussion assessment tool, instituted for the 2012 Continue Reading →

When diagnosing neuromuscular problems in patients — when they age or get a concussion, for example — doctors typically make conclusions based on information that is qualitative, or subjective. But a tablet app developed by researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering may be able to quantitatively measure neuromuscular performance for the Continue Reading →

In the final round of a televised game show that pitted top players against IBM’s AI program Watson, a humbled human jotted down an aside to his written response: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” Now even doctors are speaking that way. “I’d like to shake Watson’s hand,” says Mark Kris, an oncologist Continue Reading →

When you’re sick or have a health concern, is the Internet the first place you turn to for information? A new study shows the web is just a starting place for finding health information — most people still see a doctor for serious concerns. In a Pew study released on Monday, 35% of U.S. adults Continue Reading →

Scientists who evidently spend too much time with fireflies have managed to put all that bug-watching to good use: developing brighter LEDs. One problem with that tech is that a lot of the light gets reflected back into the device due to the way photons travel through LED materials, causing them to lose efficiency. But Continue Reading →

In 2011, NASA commissioned the National Research Council to put together a report to serve as a “comprehensive independent assessment of NASA’s strategic direction and agency management.” That report, released on Wednesday, reads as a damning litany of what’s wrong with one of the United States government’s crown jewels. NASA, for all its accomplishments over Continue Reading →

Anyone that’s ever tried to plan an outdoor activity in advance knows that weather forecasting is not an exact science, but the perpetual sky-watchers at NASA may have inadvertently found a way to improve these guesstimations. They have been testing a laser system for measuring lunar dust and soil kicked up by rocket exhausts, and Continue Reading →