Everyone knows sugar makes us feel good.
Studies have shown that sweet foods can improve adult humans’ moods and reduce crying and grimacing in babies when they are poked in the foot by researchers. But does it work on insects?
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London wanted to see whether they...
In a presidential election season dominated by talk of birth certificates, tax returns and email servers, science has rarely made headlines. But that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. On the contrary, policy decisions made by the next president will influence the future of the planet and all its inhabitants...
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is about to come to an end, and you can watch for the final signal live, right here.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be streaming live from ESA’s European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, where scientists from around the world...
An international team of astronomers has discovered what might be the first evidence of density-driven spiral arms in the gas and dust around a still-forming star.
The findings, described in the journal Science, could offer an unprecedented glimpse at a key stage in a young star’s life, and may...
What is HyperBody? Is it a class? A person? Performance art? Is it, ultimately, for real?
The simple answer is that HyperBody is all of the above.
HyperBody, the fitness craze with the same name as its guru, combines dance aerobics, high-intensity interval training and a heavy dose of lasers,...
This Friday, something unusual will happen in the sky over Los Angeles. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see it.
Sept. 30 marks the emergence of the “black moon” — when a second new moon rises in one month. Like all new moons, you cannot see it with the naked eye, because the side of the moon...
It was conceived when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. It launched a few weeks after Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm. It spent a full decade looping around the solar system. And when it finally caught up with its target, it deployed the first probe to land on a speeding...
For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows.
In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom...
Scientists have 3-D-printed splints for babies’ airways, faux brains to study cortical folding — and now they’ve done it with bone. A team of researchers at Northwestern University has created a highly flexible artificial bone that helps speed up recovery and that can be easily manipulated by surgeons...
The birth rate for U.S. teenagers hit an all-time low in 2015, the seventh straight year a new record has been set.
Overall, there were 22.3 births for every 1,000 young women between 15 and 19, according to a report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That represents...
Meditating has always been about unplugging, finding a quiet place with no distractions and experiencing a few minutes of solitude.
But a new way of meditating, courtesy of famed doctor and self-help author Deepak Chopra, flips that notion on its head. In his re-imagining, instead of disconnecting,...
Trying to avoid the gory details of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s divorce? It might be wise to pay attention and learn from their mistakes -- because, under all that glitz, they’re human too.
“I don’t think it’s fair to say that celebrities are more narcissistic or self-centered than noncelebs,...
To build a following, narcissism works. Briefly.
But if, as they say in this electoral season, you’re looking to “grow your base,” exercising emotional intelligence — expressing empathy, checking your emotions in a bid to avoid conflict, and investing in personal relationships — is a strategy that...
A healthy baby boy is the first person to be born with DNA from three people, according to a medical report released Tuesday.
In addition to inheriting nuclear DNA from his mother and father, the infant also has mitochondrial DNA from a second woman who served as an egg donor.
Testosterone, the big daddy (if you will) of male hormones, has gotten a bit of a bad reputation, what with it being linked to bluster, aggression, violent offending and a whole raft of behaviors at which men do seem to best women consistently.
But in humans, new research suggests that’s not the...
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of water vapor spewing out of the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The water appears to shoot about 125 miles high and may come from the global ocean thought to lie beneath its frozen shell.
The discovery, set to be published in the Astrophysical...
Maybe hacking your meditation practice with high-tech programs and devices also is the ultimate irony, but can they really be time savers? A brain-trainer?
I tested three systems that promised to deliver more quickly the effects of meditation.
As they say about traditional meditation, you don’t...
Just ask any one of the 300,000 Americans who, in any given year, develop kidney stones: What if the excruciating pain of passing one of those little devils could be prevented by strapping yourself into a make-believe runaway mine train, throwing your hands in the air and enduring G-forces as high...
It’s one of the most enduring mysteries in earthquake science: Why do small earthquakes stay small, while others grow into monsters?
A group of researchers offered a partial, but tantalizing answer this month: The moon and big tides.
How does this work?
The scientists zeroed in on times of high...
Pluto’s “heart” is spilling its secrets. Scientists using data from NASA’s New Horizons mission have found more evidence that there may be an ocean beneath the dwarf planet’s surface.
The findings, published by Geophysical Research Letters, could shed light on the internal mysteries of this frigid,...
Scientific and secular supporters of meditation are using the ancient practice as an aid for modern afflictions such as high blood pressure, insomnia, depression and anxiety.
“Thirty million Americans have tried meditation. It’s in the mainstream and it’s good for your mental health,” said Varun...
A type of bumblebee native to North America may soon be named to the endangered species list. It would be the first bee species to be considered endangered in the United States.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday formally proposed that the Bombus affinis, or rusty patched bumblebee,...
Fitness these days might be all about a newfangled studio fad — but sometimes there's nothing better than a good old-fashioned walk. Here are a couple of ideas for getting in your steps:
Try the Detour app for some colorful insight into the neighborhood you're ambling through. Detour brought in...
Not every scientific study can be about weighty topics, like gravity waves or gene editing. Sometimes you can gain a true scientific insight by discovering that mammals of vastly different sizes require roughly the same amount of time to empty their bladders, or by noticing that people who speak...
Newly minted MacArthur fellow Dianne Newman is a huge fan of tiny microbes.
Sit down with her in her homey office at the Caltech campus in Pasadena, and the 44-year-old microbiologist will dazzle you with amazing tales of these miniature organisms.
She might mention that there are so many microbes...
Victoria Orphan was on a boat off the Southern California coast in 1993 when she asked a graduate student sampling seawater about his research. He stained a sample with fluorescent dye and put it under a microscope. Orphan, then a UC Santa Barbara undergraduate, stared at the dense constellations...
The solutions to global health problems usually come with a hefty price tag. Manu Prakash is working to change that.
Among his many inventions is the Foldscope, a lightweight microscope made from a single sheet of paper that costs less than $1 to build. He has also created a tiny chip that can...
Sometimes science seems like science, and sometimes it seems like magic.
This week, computer scientists at the University of Kentucky, Lexington described how they virtually unfurled a charred and crushed biblical scroll dating back nearly 2000 years.
Thanks to their work, scholars are now able to...
Meeting under the umbrella of the United Nations General Assembly, international leaders on Wednesday launched new efforts to stem the rising tide of antimicrobial resistance, which has blunted the effectiveness of existing medications in treating infectious diseases.
Heads of state and country...
Halloween is right around the corner, which means Thanksgiving and Christmas will be coming up soon. If you’re already worried about putting on extra pounds over the holidays, a new study has some discouraging news: Your fears are justified.
Americans who participated in the study saw their weight...
There are certainly many perks that come with a job at the top of the corporate ladder, but this is not one of them: When people with prestigious jobs fall into depression, they are less likely to benefit from treatment than their coworkers several rungs below them.
In a study of 654 employed patients...
Life sometimes foils the best of our intentions.
New research on women, stress and diet amply illustrates that sad fact. It shows that even when women greeted a new day with a “better-for-you” fast-food breakfast, that meal’s expected health-promoting qualities were washed away by the carry-over...
Conservationist John Craighead, who will be forever linked to America's wild rivers and a seminal study of grizzly bears, has died. He was 100.
Craighead, who had been ailing for years, died in his sleep at his Missoula home Sunday, according to his son Johnny.
The Missoulian reports that upon...
Men over 40 who are plagued with the omnipresent of generalized anxiety disorder are more than twice as likely to die of cancer than are men who do not have the mental affliction, new research finds. But for women who suffer from severe anxiety, the research found no increased risk of cancer death.
...In a bid to stanch the death toll of the nation’s epidemic of opioid drug use, the Food and Drug Administration is calling for the development of a cellphone app that could quickly bring lifesaving medication to the rescue of a person in the throes of a potentially deadly overdose.
The FDA on Monday...
For men whose sex drive has stalled, Italian researchers have found in a small study that early morning exposure to bright light – a treatment widely used for seasonal depression -- revs up testosterone production and boosts sexual function and satisfaction.
In a pilot trial that recruited 38...
Why does drinking lead to hook-ups? One theory is that alcohol makes people feel more frisky. Another is that it simply causes people to let loose and act more impulsively, facilitating all kinds of behavior that would otherwise be considered inappropriate.
Swiss researchers designed a study to...
Angelenos are notoriously fickle about their workouts; always chasing the next insane challenge to crush.
But more burpees aren’t necessarily the answer.
Here are our picks for three workouts – all under an hour – that will bring the challenge without feeling like a chore.
THE LAGREE METHOD
Sometimes...
Indoor cycling has legions of devotees in Los Angeles, who flock to it for the intensity of the exercise and compelling group vibe. But sometimes it's not enough to just do a class; some spinners want to know exactly how they did, how fast they cycled, how hard they worked.
And they want the bike...
A few upcoming health events focus on meditation and wellness, as well as helping others. Here are a few to consider:
Yoga has its own award. The Namaste Award is the centerpoint of the annual Thank You Mother India event organized by the Yoga Gives Back foundation. Oscar-nominated director David...
Treatments for kids with leukemia have improved so much that it is no longer the deadliest childhood cancer in the U.S., according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The top spot now belongs to brain cancer, the CDC said.
Combined, the two diseases account for...
Pokemon Go players can be relentlessly determined to catch ’em all.
So much so that some may be tempted to break the rules of the road ...
and even the game ...
Twitter confessionals like this have caused public health researchers to lament the dangers posed by Pokemon Go players who are so dedicated...
Take a good look at the piece of cloth pictured at the top of this story. That was made 6,000 years ago by people living on the coast of Peru.
Now check out those faint blue lines running through it. Yes, they’re washed out, but you can still see them.
This square of striped cotton, and a few...
Hawaiian honeycreepers have lived in the islands’ tropical forests for millennia, but the colorful finch-like birds are facing “imminent collapse” on Kauai, experts say.
Scientists have observed severe population declines in almost all of the island’s honeycreepers, a famously diverse family of...
The Milky Way just got a little more crowded. The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has mapped more than a billion stars in the galaxy with unprecedented accuracy and detail — and it has already discovered 400 million more previously unknown stars.
The stellar trove of 1.142 billion stars,...
A first-of-its-kind study is strengthening the case that Zika is the culprit behind Brazil’s mysterious surge in babies born with microcephaly.
Preliminary results from a study commissioned by the Brazilian Ministry of Health found that 13 out of 32 newborns with microcephaly tested positive for...
At 6 feet 3 and 236 pounds, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is, like more than two-thirds of Americans, overweight. He takes a statin medication that keeps his cholesterol numbers well within healthy limits.
With a family history of alcoholism, he doesn’t drink alcohol, and his blood-pressure...
The fringe-lipped bat hunts by ear.
The winged predator, found in South and Central America, eavesdrops on the male tungara frog’s mating call and decides on the moment to strike. When the time is right, the bat flies from its perch, using echolocation to hone in on its prey and strike.
Many animals,...
