News
- Health & Medicine
Injections cut need for HIV drugs
An experimental vaccine, when given to people infected with HIV, appears to reduce their dependence on antiviral drugs.
- Humans
Death can outdo ABCs of prevention
Abstinence and monogamy may deserve little, if any, credit for the recent drop in the proportion of Ugandans who are infected with HIV.
- Health & Medicine
Inner-brain electrode may curb depression
Deep-brain electrical stimulation has shown promise in treating severe depression.
- Astronomy
Radiation from a baby star
X-ray telescopes have captured the earliest and clearest view of the core of a gas cloud about to transform into a star.
-
Master gene found for insect smell
A single gene may oversee the sense of smell in a variety of insect species.
- Anthropology
Inside view of our wee, ancient cousins
A tiny, humanlike species that inhabited an Indonesian island more than 20,000 years ago possessed a brain that shared some organizational features with Homo erectus, a large-brained human ancestor that thought in complex ways.
-
Faces elicit strong emotions in autism
Children with autism avoid eye contact because they experience uncomfortably intense emotional reactions when looking at faces.
-
Infectious Evolution: Ancient virus hit apes, not our ancestors, in the genes
A potentially deadly infection wormed its way into the DNA of ancestral chimpanzees and gorillas between 4 million and 3 million years ago, thus altering the evolution of these African apes while keeping clear of human ancestors on that same continent.
- Planetary Science
Martian Landscaping: Spacecraft eyes evidence of a frozen sea
After analyzing images taken by the orbiting Mars Express spacecraft, researchers reported that a flat region near the Red Planet's equator holds a frozen ocean that was once the size of the North Sea.
- Animals
Shortcut to Big Heart: Pythons build cardiac muscle in record time
A Burmese python can boost its cardiac fitness—by bulking up its heart muscle 40 percent in two days—just by eating.
- Astronomy
Nursery Pictures: Astronomers glimpse primordial clustering
Astronomers have found the earliest traces of galaxy clustering, from a period just 1 billion years after the birth of the universe.
- Earth
Warm Spell: Arctic algae record shift in climate
Analyses of sediment samples taken from remote arctic lakes indicate that the climate across large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere has been warming for many decades.
