Security and Defense
When anthrax was sent through the U.S. Postal Service in 2001, an overwhelming majority of postal workers elected not to be inoculated with the available vaccine because of confusion and distrust, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health study.
A device that can bestow invisibility to an object by "cloaking" it from visual light is closer to reality.
As fighting continues in Gaza, a University of Michigan survey of neighboring Lebanon illuminates some of the values underlying the use of violence in the Middle East.
A researcher from the University of Leicester has identified what looks to be the oldest archaeological evidence for chemical warfare--from Roman times.
Thanks to a new strategy devised by researchers at University of California, Davis and Intel Corporation, computer network administrators might soon be able to mount effective, low-cost defenses against self-propagating infectious programs known as worms.
A study in the Dec. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that after a one-hour delay of school start times, teens increased their average nightly hours of sleep and decreased their "catch-up sleep" on the weekends, and they were involved in fewer auto accidents.
It's been a long year with a presidential election campaign that never seemed to end and a stock market that exploded with volatility, mostly on the down side.
So why are the powers that be adding more than the usual one day to this leap year, and why should you care?
In the hit 1998 movie Armageddon, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck blew up an asteroid to save the world. While the film was science fiction, the chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth one day are very real ? and blowing up an asteroid in real life, says a Tel Aviv University researcher, will be more complicated than in the movies.
A new report from the Institute of Medicine proposes revisions to medical residents' duty hours and workloads to decrease the chances of fatigue-related medical errors and to enhance the learning environment for these doctors in training.
At least one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness, a condition caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas, and no effective treatments have yet been found, a federal panel of scientific experts and veterans concludes in a landmark report released Monday.
"The increasing number of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) raises the risk of domestic violence and its consequences on families and children in communities across the United States," says Monica Matthieu, Ph.D., an expert on veteran mental health and an assistant professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.
Palin takes on basic science research as an example of government waste.
Join the Science Blog crew this Friday, October 24 at noon in Los Angeles to discuss Obama, McCain and the sciences, courtesy of Farmlab.
In the first three days of the country's economic meltdown that began Sept. 29, 81 percent of Americans surveyed in a national poll agreed or strongly agreed that the financial crisis "poses a greater threat to the quality of my life than does the threat of terrorism." And researchers found little trust in the government and even less in business leaders.
A newly crafted compound has a particularly interesting characteristic profile: it is solid at room temperature, is a highly powerful explosive, and can be melt-cast into the desired shape.
