An on-board air filtration system called  high-efficiency cabin air, or HECA, developed specifically for school buses reduced exposure to vehicular pollutants by up to 88 percent, according to a new paper. study by researchers at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. 

The HECA system could help protect the 25 million American children who commute on school buses nearly every day, according to the authors from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Children are more susceptible to air pollution than adults because they breathe more quickly and their immune and cardiovascular systems are still developing, said Yifang Zhu, the study's senior author and an associate professor in the department of environmental health sciences. 

The world's challenges demand science solutions - and fast - but it doesn't need the old style of detached experts, write a team of scientists in, ironically, one of America's most prominent and detached corporate science publications; Science magazine, a reputable legacy publication with a politician leading them.

Segregated expertise, like segregated articles of taxpayer-funded science, is obsolete.

A child's reading progression isn't based on age, so you need to know what stage your child is up to in order to help them. Image credit:  Shutterstock

Learning to read is a complicated process and parents often wonder if their child is developing reading abilities at the rate they “should”. Research agrees, however, that reading (and writing) is very much a developmental process, which can look very different for different children, regardless of their age.

Amateur athletes are competitive and they are always looking for an advantage even if it isn't their careers, so it is no surprise that supplement stores are filled with promises of gains.

Nitrate supplements, claiming to  improve the efficiency at which muscles use oxygen, have been popular for years, but do they work? 

A new study says they may increase performance--they decrease the viscosity of blood, aiding in blood flow, while at the same time ensuring that tissue oxygen requirements are not compromised. 

(The XVIth edition of "Neutrino Telescopes" is going on in Venice this week. The writeup below is from a talk by M.Nakahata at the morning session today. For more on the conference and the results shown and discussed there, see the conference blog.)

Researchers have shown that a strong electric field applied to a section of the Keystone pipeline can smooth oil flow and yield significant pump energy savings.

Traditionally, pipeline oil is heated over several miles in order to reduce the oil's thickness (which is also known as viscosity), but this requires a large amount of energy and counter-productively increases turbulence within the flow. In 2006 Rongjia Tao of Temple University in Pennsylvania proposed a more efficient way of improving flow rates by applying an electric field to the oil. The idea is to electrically align particles within the crude oil, which reduces viscosity and turbulence.

A newly characterized group of pharmacological compounds block both the inflammation and nerve cell damage seen in mouse models of multiple sclerosis, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the brain and spinal cord, where for unknown reasons, the body's immune system begins an inflammatory attack against myelin, the protective nerve coating that surrounds nerve fibers. Once myelin is stripped from these fibers, the nerve cells become highly susceptible to damage, which is believed to underlie their destruction, leading to the steady clinical decline seen in progressive forms of multiple sclerosis.

The number of seagulls in the Strait of Georgia is down by 50 per cent from the 1980s and University of British Columbia researchers say the decline reflects changes in the availability of food.

Researchers collected 100 years of data on population numbers of Glaucous-winged Gulls, the most common seagull species found in the Lower Mainland, Victoria, Nanaimo and elsewhere in the region. They found that the population increased rapidly beginning in the early 1900s, but started to drop after the mid-1980s, with their work pointing to diet as one factor in the decline of the bird's health.

A new species of algae has been discovered in reef corals of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf where it helps corals to survive seawater temperatures of up to 36 degrees Celsius - temperatures that would kill corals elsewhere.

Researchers from the University of Southampton and the New York University Abu Dhabi identified the symbiotic algae in corals from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the world's warmest coral reef habitat.

New type symbiotic alga lends its brown color to a Porites coral from Abu Dhabi reefs. Credit: Wiedenmann, Burt

Extra virgin olive oil is believed to have heart health benefits but a new paper takes that one better and shows why it has been identified for its rapid destruction of cancer cells. 

While scientists have shown that the oleocanthal compound found in  extra virgin olive oil   causes cell death in cancer cells, they have been unable to provide an explanation for this phenomenon until now.