News
- Health & Medicine
Soldiers in Iraq coming down with parasitic disease
Hundreds of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have contracted leishmaniasis, a parasite-borne disease that attacks the skin.
- Health & Medicine
Probing a parasite for vulnerability
Researchers have discovered an enzyme that is indispensable to the parasite that causes sleeping sickness, and disabling that enzyme could offer a novel treatment strategy for the disease.
- Health & Medicine
Preventive drugs protect children
Preventive treatment with inexpensive drugs decreases rainy-season cases of malaria in Senegal.
- Earth
Some temblors probably were triggered by tides
Detailed analyses of large earthquakes suggest that some of them may have been triggered by strong tides in Earth's crust.
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Clock genes regulate blood sugar
Circadian-clock genes may play an important role in governing the body's metabolism of dietary sugars and fats.
- Earth
Inhaled particles damage vascular lining
Airborne soot and other pollutant particles can impair the ability of tiny vessels in the body to properly regulate blood flow, an animal study finds.
- Math
Con Artist: Scanning program can discern true art
A new mathematical tool distills painting style into an array of statistics as a potential means to spot forgeries.
- Astronomy
Extrasolar Planet News: Superplanet or brown dwarf?
New observations of an oddball planetary system 150 light-years from Earth suggest that some planets either are superheavy, more than 17 times as massive as Jupiter, or that they form from disks of gas and dust that encircle not just a single star, but two starlike objects.
- Materials Science
Transparent Transistor: See-through component for flexible displays
Transparent transistors deposited on flexible sheets of plastic could find their way into computer displays embedded in car windshields and other curved surfaces.
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Seminal Discovery: Promiscuous females speed sperm evolution
A gene responsible for semen viscosity has evolved more rapidly in primate species with promiscuous females than in monogamous species.
- Earth
Damp sandcastles
What keeps the 500-meter-tall dunes of China's Badain Jaran desert immobile, despite arid, windy conditions, is a previously unknown source of groundwater.
- Animals
Color at Night: Geckos can distinguish hues by dim moonlight
The first vertebrate to ace tests of color vision at low light levels—tests that people flunk—is an African gecko.
