People who get a blacklegged tick bite may be getting more pathogens than they expected.  A new study found that ticks are almost twice as likely as previously believed to be infected with two pathogens—the bacterium that causes Lyme disease and the protozoan that causes babesiosis.  

Almost 30 percent of the ticks were infected with the agent of Lyme disease. One-third of these were also infected with at least one other pathogen. The agents of Lyme disease and babesiosis were found together in 7 percent of ticks.

If you could live longer, would you be weaned on an extreme, emaciating diet?

The search for the foundation of youth has been happening forever and a popular idea in recent years has been caloric restriction - mice weaned on starvation diets live long and a new study of the tiny nematode worm C. elegans finds results even more alarming - it triggered a state of arrested development.

Einstein's theory of relativity conceptualizes time as we would a spatial dimension, like height, width, and depth. But unlike dimensions, time seems to permit motion in only one direction: forward. 

This directional asymmetry — the "arrow of time" — is something of a head fake in theoretical physics. It's not a dimension if it's based on three dimensions and it isn't a dimension if it only goes one way. Like an ant walking around a wire in string theory, it makes for fine popular storytelling, but is it science? 

It's puzzling how some people can look at a baby and say 'she looks like her dad' - computers have historically been even more limited. While a four-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken", that sort of problem stumps computers.

But next week at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, a University of Central Florida research team is going to show a facial recognition tool that is not only capable of matching pictures of parents and their children but can create accurate photos of missing children who will have aged.

Nature gets a bad rap, according to a new paper. For thousands of years, fickle weather has been blamed for tremendous suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han."

Scientists have created a one-step process for producing highly efficient materials that let the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell - by finding a simple way to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon that allows more than 99 percent of sunlight to reach the cells' active elements, where it can be turned into electricity.

The more light absorbed by a solar panel's active elements, the more power it will produce. But the light has to get there. Coatings in current use that protect the active elements let most light pass but reflect some as well.

Various strategies have cut reflectance down to about 6 percent but the anti-reflection is limited to a specific range of light, incident angle and wavelength.