News
- Earth
Study links dioxin to breast cancer
A new study finds support for the long-proposed hypothesis that dioxin, a hormonelike pollutant, can trigger breast cancer in heavily exposed women.
-
Corporal punishment takes research hit
A review of 88 studies concludes that corporal punishment, such as spanking, yields no psychological or behavioral benefits for children and may prove harmful in some cases.
- Astronomy
An assault on comets
Over the next few years, a trio of comet missions, one of which was launched recently, promises to provide the closet look yet at the core of these icy relics from the formation of the solar system.
- Earth
Monsoon Warning: Data hint at wet and blustery future
Asian monsoons have been intensifying over the last 400 years, and they're slated to get worse.
- Health & Medicine
For Failing Hearts: Gene therapy stops decline in animals
Tests in hamsters have raised hopes for creating a gene therapy to stop the common downward spiral of chronic heart failure.
- Chemistry
Mimicking the Best of Nature’s Binders: New technique produces artificial receptors
Scientists have devised a new way to make artificial receptors that differentiate among similar molecules.
-
Staying Alive with Attitude: Beliefs about aging sway seniors’ survival
In a small Ohio town, people aged 50 and over who reported a positive outlook on aging lived about 7½ years longer than those who held negative views about getting older.
- Earth
A Stinging Forecast: Model predicts chance of encountering jellyfish
Weather forecasters usually prognosticate precipitation, pollen, and poor air quality, but in some areas, they could soon provide beachgoers with the probability of confronting a jellyfish.
- Astronomy
Moveable Feast: Milky Way dines on its neighbors
Astronomers have found new evidence that the Milky Way is a cannibal, devouring streams of stars from its nearest galactic neighbors.
- Paleontology
Bone Crushers: Teeth reveal changing times in the Pleistocene
Tooth-fracture incidence among dire wolves in the fossil record can indicate how much bone the carnivores crunched and, therefore, something about the ecology of their time.
- Physics
Law and Disorder: Chance fluctuations can rule the nanorealm
A tug-of-war in a water droplet demonstrates that random fluctuations wield more than enough muscle to give nanoscale machines trouble.
- Health & Medicine
Heart damage tied to immune reaction
Researchers in Brazil have identified immune proteins that flood the heart tissues of many people with Chagas disease, suggesting a cause of this deadly complication of the parasitic tropical disease.
