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The unbearable itch that accompanies the chronic inflammatory skin condition eczema has a new culprit.Scientists have discovered that a familiar bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, ignites persistent itches by directly triggering sensory neurons in the skin, a finding that could help researchers devise new treatments.Eczema, which is also known as atopic dermatitis, is common in children and teenagers but also affects one in ten adults.Up until now, immune cells and the inflammatory molecules they secrete were thought to be…

Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow.Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtouš from Charles University in Prague probably couldn't get you out of a traffic fine, but they may have uncovered enough wiggle room in the laws of physics to send you back in time to make sure you didn't speed through that school zone in the first place.Shortcuts…

Golden staph are ubiquitous bacteria, living harmlessly on the skin or inside the nose of nearly one in three people worldwide.Yet they are duplicitous, too. In some situations, golden staph (Staphylococcus aureus) can become monsters, causing dangerous infections in the skin, blood, bones, or elsewhere. Some strains are also drug-resistant 'superbugs,' armed with features that protect them from even our best antibiotics.In a new study, however, researchers reveal valuable details about how these double-crossing bacteria…

The human face can express a world of emotions that wouldn't be possible without our eyebrows. They're a big part of what makes us human, and yet we still don't really know where these two little 'worms' of wriggling hair came from, or why.Now, researchers in Europe have identified the genes behind a spectrum of brow shapes, from thick and bushy ones to thin and wispy ones, and as it turns out, many of the genes are shared globally.Our eyebrows keep sweat and light out of our eyes, they help us communicate, and depending…

While on a family vacation in 2018, Jenny Suckale was rambling across an old Hawaiian lava flow when an abrupt change in the jet-black rocks caught her eye. On one side was the smooth, undulating lava type called pahoehoe (pronounced pah-hoy-hoy); on the other was the sharp, jagged kind known as aa (pronounced ah-ah). Ever since that day, a deceptively simple question has nagged at Suckale, a geophysicist at Stanford University: What causes the dramatic…

Coca-Cola has come up with a way for you to level up in real life. In a collaboration with Riot Games and in celebration of League of Legends, the two companies have developed a soft drink that they claim is what experience points taste like.(Author’s note: there are many different words people across the world use for soft drinks. As an American, specifically a Midwestern American, I will henceforth use what I know as the word’s one true morphology: pop.)Coke is calling the drink Ultimate Zero Sugar and, starting June…

A cycle featured in Maya calendars has been a mystery pretty much since it was rediscovered and its deciphering began in the 1940s.Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is referred to simply as the 819-day count. The problem is that researchers couldn't match that 819 days up to anything.But anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker from Tulane University now think they've finally cracked the code. All they had to do was broaden their thinking, studying how the calendar worked over a period of not 819 days, but…

Manipulating anything in the world of quantum physics is tricky, but now, scientists have managed to manipulate quantum light particles that have a strong relationship with each other. The breakthrough sounds a bit obscure, especially if you aren’t studying quantum mechanics yourself, but it’s a huge success that will be fundamental in how scientists study the quantum realm from here forward. The breakthrough was accomplished by an international team of physicists who authored a study on the manipulation of…

The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings.Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with multiple animal languages.But why should humans and other animals need to learn a language instead of being born with this knowledge, like many other animal species?This…

Are you scared of clowns? You are not alone. Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is a widely acknowledged phenomenon.Studies indicate this fear is present among both adults and children in many different cultures. Yet it is not well understood due to a lack of focused research.While numerous possible explanations of the phobia had been put forward in academic literature, no studies had specifically investigated its origins.So we set out to discover the reasons people are frightened by clowns, and to understand the…