News
- Earth
Suspended Drugs: Antibiotics fed to animals drift in air
Borne on dust floating in and around farm buildings, antibiotics given to animals may later be inhaled by people—with possibly detrimental health effects.
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Till IL-6 Do Us Part: Elderly caregivers show harmful immune effect
Elderly people caring for their incapacitated spouses experienced dramatic average increases in the blood concentration of a protein involved in immune regulation, a trend that puts them at risk for a variety of serious illnesses.
- Animals
Moonlighting: Beetles navigate by lunar polarity
A south African dung beetle is the first animal found to align its path by detecting the polarization of moonlight.
- Health & Medicine
Lethal Emergence: Tracing the rise of dengue fever in the Americas
Using the genetics of viruses, scientists have tracked a virulent form of dengue virus in Latin America back to its roots in India.
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A Matter of Taste: Mutated fruit flies bypass the salt
By creating mutant fruit flies with an impaired capacity to taste salt, researchers have identified several genes that contribute to this sensory system in insects.
- Physics
Wild Bunch: First five-quark particle turns up
Physicists have uncovered strong evidence for a family of five-quark particles after decades of finding no subatomic particles with more than three of the fundamental building blocks known as quarks.
- Humans
Ideal Justice: Mathematicians judge the Supreme Court
The current U.S. Supreme Court of nine judges behaves as if it were made up of 4.68 "ideal" justices who make their decisions completely independently, a mathematical analysis suggests.
- Materials Science
Easy Repair: Novel structural model heals with heat
The vertebrate spine has provided inspiration for making new structures that heal when heated.
- Earth
Slow Turnover: Warming trend affects African ecosystem
Over the past 90 years, rising water temperatures in Lake Tanganyika have led to dramatic losses of productivity among the microorganisms that form the base of the lake's food chain.
- Astronomy
Solar Terrain: Revealing the sun’s complex topography
The sharpest images of the sun ever taken, released last week, show our stellar neighbor’s rugged surface in new and surprising detail.
- Health & Medicine
Prevention in a Pill? Baldness drug might avert prostate cancer
The drug finasteride, given to alleviate baldness and prostate problems, might prevent some cases of prostate cancer.
- Earth
Germs Begone: New technology cleans dangerous water
For a penny per liter, people in the developing world should be able to remove most pathogens and toxic pollutants from their home drinking water.
