Chemicals & Chemistry

Bacteria come in two very broad categories based on the structure of their cell walls, the outer region that gives the cells shape and integrity.

Here's a chemical that you don't want to screw around with: sulfuric acid. The only thing good about it is that it is not volatile. The only thing bad about it is everything else.

With all due respect to government officials and their decades of well-intentioned effort to reverse algae bloom, it's now the private sector's time, led by ingenious researchers, to tackle this ever-expanding crisis.

Humans like to do something. We go to war on cancer, we battle it, we seek to defeat it.

I've been a science writer and editor for nearly eight years. During this time, I've learned a few things.

A new paper in PNAS expresses concern that decades of progress in cleaning up U.S. air quality mean improvements for two pollutants have slowed in recent years.

There can be no better example of the damage done by quackery masked as "alternative medicine" than the tragic case of Chad

Last week, a day-long meeting was held at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina to discuss the resu

A study that was just published in Environmental Science and Technology claims that PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are a significant contributor to indoor air pollution because the c

One of the problems with science communication is that we are always a day or two behind the mass media. The general pattern is this: