A new study has found that liquid waste from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” that was treated and released into local streams in Pennsylvania still contained elevated levels of salts and other contaminants, which could be dangerous to aquatic life and human health.

The National Institutes of Health’s system for selecting research projects may be considered the gold standard for equitably awarding funding, but that hasn’t kept the agency from dispatching three University of Wisconsin–Madison professors to probe the system for bias.

Scientists are reporting an advance in smartphone-based imaging that could help physicians in far-flung and resource-limited locations monitor how well treatments for infections are working by detecting, for the first time, individual viruses. Their study on the light-weight device, which converts the phone into a powerful mini-microscope, appears in the journal ACS Nano.