News
- Health & Medicine
Homegrown Defender: Urinary infections face natural guard
Specialized peptides produced by cells lining the urinary tract stand guard as the first line of defense against bacterial infection.
-
Cooked garlic still kills bacteria
Cooked garlic can kill bacteria, but less efficiently than raw garlic does.
- Health & Medicine
Can supplements nix kidney stones?
The majority of commercially available probiotic supplements don't degrade the compound that forms kidney stones.
- Health & Medicine
Dive suits could spread disease
Divers' wetsuits can harbor bacteria that cause diseases in coral and people.
-
Hand gels falter
Alcohol-based gels may not effectively eliminate from people's hands a type of virus that causes millions of cases of diarrhea worldwide each year.
- Health & Medicine
For women, weight gain spells heartburn
A study of more than 10,000 women suggests that weight gain is associated with heartburn.
-
Chimps lead way to HIV birthplace
A viral analysis confirms that the global AIDS epidemic originated in chimpanzees living in southeastern Cameroon.
-
Zits in tubeworms: Part of growing up
Young tubeworms pick up the live-in bacteria they need for nutrition in a rite of passage that starts with a skin infection.
- Earth
Deep-sea action
Scientists using remotely operated vehicles have reported the first close-up observations of a deep undersea volcano during its eruption.
- Physics
String Trio: Novel instrument strums like guitar, rings like bell
A new type of musical instrument, equipped with Y-shaped strings, may be the first of a family of string instruments with unusual overtones typically heard in bells or gongs.
- Archaeology
Stones of Contention: Tiny Homo species tied to ancient tool tradition
Controversial new discoveries suggest that our half-size evolutionary cousins who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 12,000 years ago carried on a stone-toolmaking tradition passed down from the island's original colonizers more than 700,000 years ago.
- Earth
Oil Booms: Whales don’t avoid noise of seismic exploration
Field tests in the Gulf of Mexico suggest that sperm whales there don't swim away from boats conducting seismic surveys of the seafloor, but the noise generated by such activity may be subtly affecting the whales' feeding behavior. With video.
