News
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Blame the brain for lack of rhythm
Some people are born with dysmusia, a condition marked by difficulty learning to play music or recognizing melodies.
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Perfect pitch common among the blind
Blind musicians are more likely to have perfect pitch than are sighted people.
- Health & Medicine
A vaccine to help ex-smokers
By generating antibodies that neutralize nicotine, a vaccine could keep ex-smokers from getting the nicotine high that drives many of them back to their bad habit.
- Health & Medicine
Caffeine may ward off Parkinson’s
Scientists may have found an explanation for why coffee drinking prevents Parkinson's disease.
- Paleontology
Fossil find extends ants’ ancient lineage
The recently described, 92-million-year-old fossil of a primitive worker ant pushes back the first record of its particular subfamily by 40 million years, forcing researchers to reevaluate their ideas about the early evolution of these insects.
- Animals
Time to revise right whales’ family tree?
A statistical analysis of DNA from nearly 400 right whales around the world suggests there may be three species of Eubalena, not just two—a conclusion that may boost conservation efforts.
- Astronomy
Old stars shed light on young Milky Way
Analyzing the composition of 70 of the oldest stars in the galaxy—the largest such sample so far—scientists have found new evidence that a generation of short-lived stars that died explosively must have preceded this elderly population and that the oldest part of the Milky Way originated not as a single component, but as bits and pieces that may have taken several hundred million years to form and coalesce.
- Tech
Novel sensing system catches the dud spud
A new device can detect a single potato that's infected with bacterial soft rot while buried deep in a storage crate with hundreds of healthy tubers.
- Animals
Really big guys restrain youth violence
Importing six full-grown bull elephants into a park of youngsters stopped killing sprees by young males.
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Low-cal diet may reduce cancer in monkeys
Researchers monitoring monkeys have seen signs that slashing normal calorie consumption can benefit long-lived primates by extending natural life spans and reducing the odds of suffering diseases such as cancer.
- Materials Science
To make bronze, tin flakes do a wild dance
Upsetting some prevailing ideas about how alloys form, rafts of tin atoms jitterbug madly around on a pure copper surface and leave spots of bronze in their wakes.
- Health & Medicine
Sputum Test May Predict Lung Cancer
By zeroing in on aberrations in two cancer-fighting genes, researchers have found a marker for cancer risk that could help doctors screen people for signs of lung cancer early enough for treatment to be effective.
