News
- Health & Medicine
Lung cancer gene has gender bias
The X chromosome's gastrin-releasing peptide receptor gene is turned on by nicotine to produce a protein that promotes lung cancer, a combination of factors that could explain why women are more susceptible to the disease than men are.
- Earth
Just how much do U.S. roads matter?
A Harvard researcher calculates that roads directly influence the ecology of a fifth of U.S. land area.
- Ecosystems
Males live longer with all-year mating
Male butterflies live longer in Madeira, where females are available year-round, than in Sweden, where females mature in one burst.
- Plants
Why tulips can’t dance
An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.
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Dendrite decline in schizophrenia
Cell connections in a part of the brain's frontal lobe appear to dwindle in people with schizophrenia.
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Keys to expertise in the brain
A brain region linked to face recognition may foster expertise at identifying items in any category a person strives to master.
- Astronomy
Milky Way gets a new layer
Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.
- Animals
Bees log flight distances, train with maps
After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.
- Earth
DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers
Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.
- Health & Medicine
Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset
Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.
- Physics
Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms
Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.
- Anthropology
Ancient populations were game for growth
Archaeological evidence of a Stone Age shift in dietary preferences, from slow to swift small game, suggests that the human population rose sharply sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.
