News
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Man’s brain incurs disgusting loss
A brain-damaged man yields clues to the neural organization responsible for experiencing disgust.
- Health & Medicine
Is penicillin-allergy rate overstated?
A study finds that 20 of 21 people who reported having a penicillin allergy when filling out paperwork during a hospital visit in fact don't have one, suggesting that the prevalence of this allergy is overstated.
- Health & Medicine
Marker signals esophageal cancer
Silencing of the gene that encodes the cancer-suppressing protein APC is common in people with esophageal cancer, suggesting that physicians might use this genetic abnormality as a marker for the disease.
- Physics
When all is a spin, calm is dragged in
When laboratory vortices are mixed to create the equivalent of a tornado in a hurricane, the "hurricane" may gobble up spots of calm from the outside world.
- Physics
Hot little levers write beaucoup bits
Arrays of microscopic tips may offer a way to pack digital data more tightly and transfer it more quickly than is possible with magnetic hard disks.
- Physics
Particle hunt off, collider comes down
Despite tantalizing, last-minute hints of a long-sought, mass-giving particle called the Higgs boson, dismantling of the Large Electron-Positron collider has begun.
- Earth
Life Landed 2.6 Billion Years Ago
Unusually carbon-rich rocks found in eastern South Africa may push back the evidence of life on land to 2.6 billion years ago, more than twice the current age of indisputably terrestrial organisms.
- Animals
First mammal joins the eusocial club
Because naked mole rats exhibit permanent physical traits that distinguish certain castes of a colony, they belong to the same grouping as so-called eusocial insects such as bees, ants, wasps, and termites.
- Math
Prime proof zeros in on crucial numbers
A new theorem may lead to a proof of Catalan's conjecture, a venerable problem in number theory concerning consecutive powers of whole numbers.
- Planetary Science
An early cosmic wallop for life on Earth?
New evidence from lunar meteorites suggests that debris bombarded the moon some 3.9 billion years ago, about the same time that life may have formed on Earth.
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Certain memories may rest on a good sleep
People who practice a task that demands quick visual processing perform it better on ensuing trials if they are first allowed to get some sleep.
- Health & Medicine
Vaccine protects monkeys from Ebola virus
A combination of a DNA vaccine and a vaccine based on a genetically modified common cold virus enables monkeys to resist Ebola virus, the first evidence that an Ebola vaccine works in primates.
