Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
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- Chemistry
Natural pain-killing chemical synthesized
Conolidine — a headache to isolate from the plant that makes it — can now be produced from scratch in the lab, opening the promising compound to study.
- Psychology
Geometric minds skip school
Villagers' understanding of lines and triangles raises questions about how people learn the properties of objects in space.
- Life
Suspect bacterium may trigger Parkinson’s
A study in mice shows that H. pylori, the microbe that causes stomach ulcers, may also affect the brain.
- Health & Medicine
Body & Brain
Coffee may help protect against prostate cancer, plus protecting organ transplants and limiting HIV transmission in this week’s news.
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- Health & Medicine
Healthy Aging in a Pill
To extend life span, scientists envision a drug that mimics the benefits of a near-starvation diet.
- Health & Medicine
Don’t share that clarinet
Bacteria can linger on woodwind instruments, particularly those with reeds, for days, a new study finds.
- Life
Your gut microbes are what you eat
A mammal's diet strongly influences what kinds of microorganisms live in its intestines.
- Psychology
Eyes take gossip to heart
Reading negative gossip about someone makes that person’s face easier to perceive.
- Humans
It’s time to put a price on carbon, NRC says
“It is imprudent to delay actions that at least begin the process of substantially reducing emissions [of greenhouse gases],” according to a May 12 report by the National Research Council. It didn’t get a lot of press play in the past week, perhaps because its 144 pages don’t say anything readers might not have expected this august body to have proclaimed years ago. But that shouldn’t diminish the significance of this report, its authors contend.
- Humans
Geographic profiling fights disease
Widely used to snare serial criminals, a forensic method finds application in epidemiology.
