Breakthrough in creation of gamma ray lasers that use antimatter

Superpowerful lasers for next-generation technologies are closer to existence.

  • A new study calculates how to create high-energy gamma rays.
  • Physicist Allen Mills proposes using liquid helium to make bubbles of positronium, a mixture with antimatter.
  • Gamma ray lasers can lead to new technologies in space propulsion, medical imaging and cancer treatment.
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Jeannie Gaffigan: Finding comedy in a brain tumor

Here's how a pear-sized tumor on Jeannie Gaffigan's brain stem became an unexpected comedy gold mine.

  • It was only by chance that Jeannie Gaffigan found out she had a pear-sized tumor on her brain stem. During a visit to her kid's pediatrician, the doctor noticed something off about Jeannie Gaffigan's hearing, which led to the diagnosis.
  • She needed to have immediate brain surgery. Gaffigan describes this highly stressful and uncertain time in her as traumatic—and deeply hilarious, says Gaffigan. Comedy, she says, can be used to process your traumas.
  • A comedy writer by trade, she obsessively documented the experience and asked people who visited her in hospital to make notes and lists, which she later turned into her memoir When Life Gives You Pears.
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Illinois set to approve insulin price cap of $100 for month supply

The move reflects a broader nationwide effort to lower prices of the life-saving drug.

Photo credit: Erik McGregor / Getty
  • Some 30 million Americans have diabetes and must take insulin, but about 25 percent of them can't routinely afford the drug.
  • In recent decades, the cost of insulin has skyrocketed, partly because only three companies make insulin in the U.S.
  • There's some indication that recent efforts to make insulin more affordable are picking up steam.
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Anatomical quirks: 10 things you didn't know about your body

Bill Bryson's new book, "The Body: A Guide For Occupants," provides important (and funny) lessons in anatomy, neuroscience, physiology, biology, and more.

Photo credit: Henry Guttmann / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
  • American-British scholar, Bill Bryson, has written a fascinating user's guide to the human body.
  • The Body: A Guide For Occupants provides important lessons in anatomy, neuroscience, physiology, biology, and more.
  • Though we've learn a lot about ourselves in the last two centuries, it's still clear there's much we don't know.
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Scientists replace blood with icy solution to save lives in danger

Doctors put a human into suspended animation for the first time ever.

Pixabay.
  • A trial at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore puts patients with death-causing injuries into suspended animation.
  • The technique works by cooling the body and the brain.
  • This gives surgeons more times to help the patients survive.
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