News
- Chemistry
Striking Oil: High-pressure processing minimizes trans fats
Improvements in the techniques used to hydrogenate vegetable oils could soon fill store shelves with food products containing smaller percentages of unhealthful trans fats.
- Health & Medicine
Heartening Responses: Depression drugs may aid survival after heart attack
Depressed patients recovering from heart attacks receive big heart-health benefits by taking prescribed doses of the antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
- Plants
Honey, We Shrank the Snow Lotus: Picking big plants reduces species’ height
Years of harvesting the larger plants of a Himalayan wildflower used in traditional medicines may be driving the evolution of a stubbier plant form.
- Astronomy
Core Finding: Latest, oddest planet hints at how orbs form
A newly discovered planet beyond the solar system has the most massive core of any planet known.
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Same Difference: Twins’ gene regulation isn’t identical
As identical twins go through life, environmental influences differently affect which genes are turned on and which are switched off.
- Health & Medicine
Epilepsy surgery stands test of time
Brain surgery for people with severe epilepsy keeps many of these patients free of seizures for decades.
- Animals
More junk makes for better dads
A new analysis links dutiful fatherhood in prairie voles to a stretch of DNA once dismissed as meaningless.
- Astronomy
Rumblings from a dead star
The burned-out cinder left behind when a massive Milky Way star exploded recently underwent its own outburst.
- Tech
A nanoprinter for cheaper diagnostics
Using strands of DNA as movable type, scientists have created a miniaturized printing technique for mass-producing medical diagnostic chips.
- Health & Medicine
Stem cell shift may lead to infections, leukemia
Aging of blood-producing stem cells could be responsible for the relatively high incidence of infections and myeloid leukemia in the elderly.
- Animals
He Clones, She Clones: Dad, mom ants as different species
In the little fire ant, males and queens clone themselves, the closest science has gotten to declaring males and females as separate species.
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Mother Knows Worst: Abusive parenting spans generations in monkeys
Many female rhesus monkeys who were abused as infants by their mothers do the same to their own infants, raising the prospect of using these animals as a model for human child abuse.
