Jimmy Carter's efforts against the horribly painful guinea worm parasitic disease have helped lower the number of cases from 3.5 million in 1986 to just 126 last year. Steve Mirsky reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The drugs disrupt mosquitoes' gut bacteria, which appears to make the insects more effective malaria vectors. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Households that got weekly messages about the lower pollution they generated via efficiency cut energy use much more than did residents who were told how much money they were saving. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
High UV radiation during solar maxima may have degraded expectant mothers' stores of folate, a vitamin essential to development. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
By selecting for bacteria that can survive only if they make a particular product of interest over multiple iterations, researchers vastly improved yields and decreased production times. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Under certain conditions people can catch a glimpse of usually invisible infrared light. Karen Hopkin reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Looking for movement could complement chemical searches for extraterrestrial life. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Populations of big carnivores such as brown bears, Eurasian lynx, grey wolves and wolverines are stable or increasing in a substantial part of Europe. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mice infected with Lyme and the Babesia parasite are more likely to pass on babesiosis than mice infected with babesiosis alone. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Magnetic anomalies in rocks indicate that lightning may be a major player in weathering mountains. Julia Rosen reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Congress took advantage of the pressure to pass a budget bill by adding riders that change rules concerning the environment and energy. Josh Fischman reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The urine of a vast army of tiny fish, jellies and shrimpy things may play an important role in the ocean's nitrogen cycle. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Penicillin and its relatives have been in wide use since the 1940s, but researchers have only now discovered another way that it thwarts bacteria. Karen Hopkin reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mice that ate their entire food for the day in an eight-to-12-hour window had better markers for health than did mice free to eat whenever they wanted. Steve Mirsky reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The way fruit reflects and absorbs laser light may be a good measure of its progression toward peak ripeness. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In a massive first-of-its-kind whole-genome analysis involving 48 bird species, researchers have created a new avian evolutionary tree. Steve Mirsky reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
By using tiny carbon nanotubes tuned electronically to particular gases, researchers turned smartphones into toxin sensors. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Based on trawling samples and visual observations of plastic debris, computer models calculate that some 5.25 trillion particles of plastic—about 269,000 tons—may litter the world's oceans. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Researchers estimated alcohol consumption at a senior center by putting out recycling bins and counting the bottle contents. Karen Hopkin reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A study following teens who had summer jobs found violent crime in that population almost cut in half, during and following the employment. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Working-class kids ask for help from teachers less often and less aggressively than do their middle-class counterparts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Researchers working in New York City found that hungry urban arthropods help dispose of tons of edible trash. Allie Wilkinson reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Wall Street Journal found in 2010 that an NFL game has just 11 minutes of actual action. Eight decades earlier, Scientific American found just about the same thing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson's first glimpse of Lucy came on November 24, 1974 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Importation of a frost-resistant barley from the Fertile Crescent to Tibet some 3,600 years ago is associated with the advent of settlements at 3,000 meters and more above sea level. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A new study suggests bed bugs can transmit Chagas disease to mice—but the same thing is unlikely to happen in humans. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Microbicides that kill HIV in the lab often fail in clinical trials. A study finds that semen may be the culprit. Cynthia Graber reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alcohol's supposed benefit to the heart may only be available to people with the right genes. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Some sounds from the Rosetta Mission team today after they succeeded in landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Steve Mirsky reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nonsterile lab reagents and DNA extraction kits add their own assortment of DNA to microbiome samples. Christopher Intagliata reports Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
