News
- Health & Medicine
Lyme microbe forms convenient bond with tick protein
The bacterium that causes Lyme disease commandeers a gene in the deer tick, inducing overproduction of a salivary protein that the bacterium uses to escape immune detection once it's inside a mammal.
-
Human immune signal sets off bacterial attack
A chemical secreted by immune cells when people are stressed or sick causes a common gut bacterium to go on the offensive against its host.
- Earth
Great river cycles carbon quickly
Some of the organic material carried to the sea by the Amazon is thousands of years old, but much of the carbon in carbon dioxide emanating from the river was stored in plants for less than a decade.
- Earth
What’s Gotten into Everybody? Survey of bodily contaminants finds encouraging declines and new exposures
The U.S. population's exposure to lead, secondhand smoke, and certain other harmful chemicals has trended downward, but some newly measured contaminants are present in a sizable fraction of the nation's residents, according to an updated report.
- Health & Medicine
Echinacea Disappoints: There’s still no cure for the common cold
The folk remedy echinacea shows no benefit against the common cold.
- Planetary Science
Cassini eyes youthful-looking Saturnian moon
On July 14, the Cassini spacecraft came within 175 kilometers of the south polar region of Saturn's bright, tiny moon Enceladus, revealing a tortured terrain of faults, folds, and ridges.
-
Fickle Finger’s Funny Feel: Digit illusion modifies touch perception
The brain rapidly adjusts its internal map of the body's skin surface, according to a new study of people who underwent laboratory procedures that induced illusions of finger growth or shrinkage.
-
Boning Up: Tissue for grafts grown inside the body
Scientists have discovered a new way to stimulate one part of an animal's body to grow extra bone tissue that can be transplanted elsewhere.
- Paleontology
Young and Helpless: Fossils suggest that dinosaur parents cared
Skeletal remains found in the fossilized eggs of an early dinosaur hint that adults of the species may have cared for their hatchlings.
- Animals
Wing Ding: Bird rubs feathers for cricketlike song
Scientists say that they have found the first vertebrate to make its courtship music in the same way as a cricket does.
- Physics
Glints from Inner Space: Sensing Earth’s hidden radioactivity
Physicists have observed signatures of radioactivity deep within Earth, enabling measurement of planet-wide thorium and uranium quantities.
- Astronomy
Planet potential
Observations with the Submillimeter Array on Hawaii's Mauna Kea reveal that, despite their bombardment by a stellar bully, the disks in Orion have enough material to form planets.
