Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
How being deaf can enhance sight
Hearing-specialized brain regions can adapt to processing visual input, cat experiments show.
- Life
The unusual suspects
With no obvious culprit in sight, geneticists do broader sweeps to identify autism’s causes.
- Health & Medicine
Pesticide in womb may promote obesity, study finds
One-quarter of babies born to women who had relatively high concentrations of a DDT-breakdown product in their blood grew unusually fast for at least the first year of life. Not only is this prevalence of accelerated growth unusually high, but it’s also a worrisome trend since such rapid growth during early infancy has — in other studies — put children on track to become obese.
- Health & Medicine
Getting to the bottom of diabetes and kidney disease
Renal cells called podocytes may need insulin to maintain tissues’ blood-filtration role, a study in mice finds.
- Earth
Air pollution appears to foster diabetes
Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.
- Health & Medicine
Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF
Robert Edwards receives prize for work that led to 4 million births.
- Humans
Swedish academy awards
As Nobel season opens, one researcher looks back on a century of steadily increasing U.S. dominance.
- Life
To researchers’ surprise, one Pseudomonas infection is much like the next
Consistent genetic changes in the lung bacteria that commonly plague cystic fibrosis patients are a welcome discovery because they may point to new treatment strategies.
- Health & Medicine
Pernicious influences on dietary choices
Because humanity developed during eons of cyclical feasts and famines, we survived by chowing down on energy-dense foods whenever they became available. Today that's all the time. But a number of recent studies point to additional, less obvious influences on what and how much we choose to eat.
- Humans
Ancient New Guinea settlers headed for the hills
Humans had reached the rugged land by sea and quickly adapted to the mile-high forested interior by nearly 50,000 years ago, stone tools and plant remains indicate.
- Health & Medicine
Few Americans eat right
The Institute of Medicine periodically issues recommendations on what people should eat to be healthy and maintain a reasonable weight. Americans have largely ignored this well-intentioned advice, a new study shows. It reports that “nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.”
- Life
A thousand points of height
A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.
