Visit a museum these days and you'll see people using their smartphones and cameras to take pictures of works of art, archeological finds, historical artifacts, and every other object and most of them will never be looked at again. Even worse, while taking a picture might seem like a good way to preserve the moment, new research suggests the opposite actually happens.

In a new paper, psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University presents data showing that participants had worse memory for objects, and for specific object details, when they took photos of them.

Experiments with ultrashort laser pulses support the idea that quantum interactions between molecules help plants, algae, and some bacteria efficiently gather light to fuel their growth - but that's about it. Key details of nature's vital light-harvesting mechanisms remain obscure, and the exact role that quantum physics may play in understanding them is more subtle than was once thought.

Almost 90 percent of children and adults with a highly aggressive form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) showed no evidence of cancer after receiving a personalized cell therapy that reprograms a patient's immune system.

In pilot studies of bio-engineered T cells that attack leukemia, 24 of 27 patients (89%) experienced complete responses within 28 days after treatment. In all, 27 patients received the treatment - 22 children treated at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and five adults treated at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Experimental techniques and computer simulations have determined a new way of predicting how water dissolves crystalline structures like those found in natural stone and cement. 

In a new study, the team shows that their method is more efficient at predicting the dissolution rates of crystalline structures in water than previous methods. The research could have wide-ranging impacts in diverse areas, including water quality and planning, environmental sustainability, corrosion resistance and cement construction. 

The majority of all violent crime in Sweden is committed by a small number of people and they have a definable demographic - personality disorders, substance abuse problems and almost all males (92%) who early in life develop violent criminality and begin with a large number of non-violent crimes. 

In their paper, the scholars at Sahlgrenska Academy examined 2.5 million people in Swedish criminal and population registers
and matched all convictions for violent crime in Sweden between 1973 and 2004 with nation-wide population register for those born between 1958 to 1980 (2.5 million).

In recent times, olive oil became one of the lowest health fads. Its popularity grew to such an extent that it became difficult to know if you were even buying olive oil, much less the extra virgin kind it might say on the label.

You may have been better off with the vegetable oil that might have been in it, as it turns out.  Corn oil significantly reduces cholesterol with more favorable changes in total cholesterol (TC) and LDL-C than extra virgin olive oil, according to a new paper presented today at the American Society for Nutrition's Advances&Controversies in Clinical Nutrition Conference.

In a previous article I demonstrated how to build a conductivity tester out of Snap Circuits for your Science Play and Research kit.

You can use the same circuit with a small modification to build a simple magnetic stirrer. You can also further modify the circuit to make a reversible motor driver. Reversible motor drivers are often used in robotics to drive the robot forward or reverse, turn it right or left, to raise or lower a robotic arm, to open and close a robotic gripper, and so on.

A breakthrough in understanding how cataracts form could be used to help prevent the world's leading cause of blindness, which currently affects nearly 20 million people worldwide. 

It has long been known that human eyes have a powerful ability to focus because of three kinds of crystallin proteins in their lenses, maintaining transparency via a delicate balance of both repelling and attracting light.

Two types of crystallin are structural, but the third – dubbed a "chaperone" – keeps the others from clumping into cataracts if they're modified by genetic mutation, ultraviolet light or chemical damage.

The ubiquitous ‘Stray Sock Syndrome’ can be a considerable headache for human sock-owners and sock-sorters. But help is afoot courtesy of the Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley, US, and the Max Planck Institut Informatik, Germany. Where a team of computer scientists and robotics experts have “…considered the problem of equipping a robot with the perceptual tools for reliable sock manipulation.”