News
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Health & Medicine
Tomorrow’s Clot Stoppers? New anticoagulants show promise
Two experimental drugs could become alternatives to warfarin and a class of other products that are used widely to protect against potentially fatal blood clots.
By Ben Harder -
Brain Training Puts Big Hurt on Intense Pain: Volunteers learn to translate imaging data into neural-control tool
Using brain-imaging technology, researchers have trained people to control activity in a pain-related brain area by using mental techniques, thus enabling them to reduce the intensity of temporary or chronic pain.
By Bruce Bower -
Astronomy
Cosmic Expansion: Supernovas shed light on dark energy
A new study of light from supernovas provides additional hints that dark energy, the mysterious entity revving up the expansion of the universe, might be distributed uniformly throughout space and time.
By Ron Cowen -
Tech
Reaction in Hand: Microreactor produces radioactive probe in a jiffy
A miniature chemical reactor that whips up a diagnostic tool could widen the availability of positron-emission tomography (PET) scans.
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Shades of Flesh Tone: Tests reveal gene for people’s skin color
Researchers have identified a gene that they propose plays a major role in determining a person's skin color.
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Earth
TB Dilemma: Badger refugees complicate culling
Two new analyses bring an ironic twist to the heated debate over whether badgers in Britain should be killed to prevent them from spreading tuberculosis among cattle.
By Susan Milius -
Earth
Glacial Change: Greenland’s ice loss doubled in 2005
A host of observations suggests that Greenland's ice sheet diminished this year at a rate more than twice that seen just a few years ago.
By Sid Perkins -
Health & Medicine
Shots often don’t reach muscle
Standard 3-centimeter needles are too short to penetrate the layer of fat in the buttocks of most women and most obese men, so injected medications aimed at muscle often don't reach their targets.
By Ben Harder -
Health & Medicine
New software aids virtual colonoscopy
A computer program helps radiologists spot dangerous growths in the colon without probing inside the body.
By Ben Harder -
Astronomy
Dark shadows
New radio telescope images of the center of the Milky Way make an even more compelling case that a supermassive black hole resides there.
By Ron Cowen -
Earth
Microbe polishes off pollutant
Researchers have determined how long a pesticide residue would remain in the environment if the microbe Pseudomonas pavonaceae didn't metabolize it.
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Best Friend’s Genome: Dog’s DNA sheds light on human genetics, too
Scientists have published the genome of a boxer, a detailed comparison of the dog's genome with the genomes of mice and people, and a study of genetic variation among dog breeds.