News

  1. Health & Medicine

    Asthma pressure may shrink airways

    Mechanical stress from constricting muscles could cause airway-lining cells to reproduce, eventually thickening the lining and narrowing the air passage.

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  2. Chemistry

    Now, nylon comes in killer colors

    Chemists are improving antibacterial fabrics by treating them with compounds that prolong their killing power and add color.

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  3. The planet that isn’t

    An astronomer has formally retracted her claim that she and her colleagues had likely taken the first image of a planet outside the solar system.

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  4. Astronomy

    Observatory on a suicide mission

    Fearing that its 9-year-old workhorse, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, could plunge uncontrollably through the atmosphere if one more of its gyroscopes fails, NASA has decided to crash the spacecraft into the Pacific Ocean in early June.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Chemotherapy baldness thwarted in rats

    Scientists studying rats have now developed a medication that wards off chemotherapy-induced baldness.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Protein predicts prostate cancer spread

    Prostate cancer patients who harbor high concentrations of a protein called thymosine beta-15 in their tumors face an increased risk that the cancer will spread.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Getting melanoma chemotherapy to work

    A drug that turns off a gene that blocks the action of chemotherapy in melanoma shows promise against this lethal skin cancer.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    High estrogen linked to lung cancer

    Estrogen receptors proliferating on tumor cells in women's lungs may account for why women seem more easily affected by the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoke.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Breast cancer options made clearer

    An inexpensive test for two proteins in the blood can indicate whether women with breast cancer that hasn't yet spread to lymph nodes are likely to face such a relapse after surgery.

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  10. Earth

    Impurities clock crystal growth rates

    A novel method for measuring tiny amounts of hydrogen-containing impurities allows researchers to determine growth rates along different directions in a quartz crystal.

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  11. Dementia may travel lonely road in elderly

    Social isolation may promote the development of Alzheimer's disease and other brain ailments among elderly people.

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  12. Nerve connections come ready to assemble

    Nerve cells seem to package key components of synapses—the specialized complexes than connect the nerve cells—and collectively ship the material to points where these complexes take shape.

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