Uncategorized
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Gene might underlie travelers’ diarrhea
Travelers to Mexico who get diarrhea are more likely than healthy travelers to have a particular variant form of the gene for the glycoprotein lactoferrin.
- Health & Medicine
Protecting against a difficult microbe
By using DNA from the bacterium Clostridium difficile, scientists have fashioned a vaccine against the microbe.
- Health & Medicine
Flu vaccine seems to work for kids under 6 months of age
Babies younger than 6 months appear fully capable of responding to a flu shot.
- Health & Medicine
Dengue strikes United States
Texas has been hit with the first-ever outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever in the continental United States.
- Animals
Ivory-billed hopes flit to Florida
There's no photo, but a team of ornithologists says that its sightings suggest that a few ivory-billed woodpeckers still live along the Choctawhatchee River in Florida.
- Physics
Electromagnetism could ease the flow in oil pipelines
A few minutes of exposure to a magnetic or electric field sharply reduces crude oil's viscosity for hours at a time.
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Itsy bitsy genome
Researchers have sequenced the smallest genome yet discovered, a string of DNA belonging to a species of bacterium that lives inside sap-eating insects' guts.
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19749
This article made me wonder how long a gas planet is expected to survive when one of its faces is more than 1,000°C. The conventional model of our solar system assumes that gas planets can form and survive only in a cold region of space. This implies that Upsilon Andromedae b moved to its present […]
- Astronomy
Feeling the heat of an extrasolar planet
Astronomers have measured the temperature variation between the lit and unlit sides of a planet outside the solar system.
- Planetary Science
Satanic Winds
Dust devils send prodigious amounts of dust into Earth's atmosphere, and on Mars the electric fields generated by the dusty vortices may actually stimulate changes in atmospheric chemistry that sterilize the soil.
- Animals
Why Play Dead?
Common wisdom dictates that playing dead discourages predators, but researchers are now thinking harder about how, or whether, that strategy really works.
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19748
I am amazed that this article concluded that “Scientists have a long way to go to explain why” prey animals play dead. As a veterinarian, I have learned that there are separate centers in the brain dealing with predatory behavior and with hunger. The effect seems to be that predatory behavior, by itself, is satisfying, […]
