News
- Plants
Lowering lilies on the tree of life
Water lilies may belong on the lowest branch of the family tree of flowering plants, along with a shrub called Amborella.
- Earth
Infectious stowaways
A new study finds that ballast water can move huge quantities of cholera germs and other microbes between ports around the globe.
- Earth
Problems with eradicating polio
The oral vaccine's live but attenuated virus may in rare cases revert to the disease-causing form, which can then turn up in natural waters even in regions now certified free of the wild-type virus.
- Health & Medicine
Cancer cells on the move
A new study suggests how a gene recently linked to liver, skin, and pancreatic cancer also causes an often-deadly form of breast cancer.
- Health & Medicine
Boldly into the breech controversy
Addressing a long-simmering controversy, a large new study has shown that in pregnancies where the baby has positioned itself to emerge feet or buttocks first, the delivery safest for the mother and child is a planned cesarean section rather than a vaginal birth.
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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.
