Tag: Spring2016

America and much of the world are facing a clean-water crisis of epic proportions. It came to the forefront in the states recently with the Flint, Michigan lead-water fiasco that has poisoned thousands, been linked to a Legionnaires’ disease breakout that killed several people and resulted in criminal charges against three city and state workers....

You can’t give up glazed donuts just by willpower. Researchers at Duke University have shown that a habit rewires the brain to ensure that our nervous system will continue to crave the fix. The scientists addicted mice to sugar in varying severities, then surveyed the nerve networks in the part of the brain that governs...

Hunger remains a problem in developed countries — not for lack of food, but for lack of getting it where it needs to go before it rots. Two new online ventures are showing how the problem can be solved. Cropmobster, covering seven counties in central California, lets growers and producers post their wares for hundreds...

Investors looking to profit from the Internet of Things (IoT) — in which every device digitally communicates with every other device — need to know which sectors of that fluid market have the most room to grow.  A recent study by market analyst VisionMobile shows that the IoT’s industrial sector is virtually mature already (factory...

The Los Angeles River bed is a vast concrete trough through the city that remains dry except for the occasional flood that it channels away from the city to the Pacific Ocean. A study by the private, nonprofit Los Angeles River Revitalization Corp. envisions converting 660 down-at-the-heels industrial acres along the riverbed into an urban...

Starry, an upstart startup, has created a plug-and-play wireless Internet-access technology that can deliver a full gigabit of data through a tabletop device no bigger than a metronome on top of a piano. Typical Wi-Fi networks operate on the 2.4- to 5-gigahertz radio bandwidths, with higher numbers able to handle more data. Starry has moved...

A new study from brain scientists at the University of California, Irvine highlights a warning for new mothers: Put away the cellphone when dealing with the baby. The study found links between chaotic and interrupted interactions between baby and mother and depression, drug use and other risky behaviors among adolescents. To develop properly, the brain...