Engineering Design

  1. Health & Medicine

    Bones: Custom cushioning helps heal a bad break

    If the stiff casts encasing broken limbs included an inflatable air bladder instead of a soft lining, costly and painful complications experienced by some patients during healing might be avoided, two teens reported at the 2015 Intel ISEF competition.

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  2. Brain

    Hands-free but still distracted

    When people aren’t distracted, they can see a traffic light change very quickly. But a teen scientist now shows that texting — even with a hands-free device — gets dangerously slow.

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  3. Animals

    What’s the buzz? A new mosquito lure

    Broadcasting a fake buzz can lure male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes away from females. That could reduce populations of these annoying — and disease-causing — insects, reports a teen at the 2015 Intel ISEF competition.

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  4. Cookie Science 16: If I had to do it all again

    My second cookie experiment didn’t turn out quite like I planned. Here’s what I would do differently, knowing what I do now.

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  5. Chemistry

    Cool Jobs: Saving precious objects

    Museum conservators are experts at protecting and restoring precious objects. Along with art or history, many also have studied chemistry, physics, archaeology or other scientific fields.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Injected nanoparticles treat internal wounds

    Soldiers wounded in a bombing could be treated with a shot of specially designed nanoparticles that stop bleeding and inflammation in the lungs.

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  7. Tech

    Cool Jobs: Big future for super small science

    Scientists using nanotechnology grow super-small but very useful tubes with walls no more than a few carbon atoms thick. Find out why as we meet three scientists behind this huge new movement in nanoscience.

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  8. Physics

    News Brief: As timely as it gets

    A newly modified atomic clock won’t lose or gain a second for 15 billion years. This timepiece is about three times more precise than an earlier version.

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  9. Cookie Science 15: Results aren’t always sweet

    From my latest experiment, I now know how to make a cookie that my friend can enjoy. But here’s a puzzle: I could not repeat some results from my first set of tests.

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  10. Agriculture

    Ditching farm pollution — literally

    An Indiana project shows how fighting fertilizer runoff can save farmers money, protect wild habitats and prevent harmful algae blooms.

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  11. Space

    Mini-sats: The trick to spying Earth-bound asteroids?

    NASA is supposed to begin nonstop screening by 2020 for all asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. Some astronomers now think the only way to affordably meet that deadline is by using mini-satellites

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  12. Chemistry

    Goopy tech leaves older 3-D printing in its wake

    A new way of 3-D printing combines light and oxygen to create solid objects from liquid resin. The method quickly creates detailed objects.

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