Humans
- Anthropology
Macaws bred far from tropics during pre-Columbian times
Colorful birds possibly raised for ceremonial and trade purposes long before Spanish arrival
- Tech
House passes medical isotopes bill
A spot of encouraging news emerged yesterday on the medical-isotope front. The House of Representatives voted 440 to 17 in favor of a bill to reestablish domestic production of molybdenum-99. It’s the feedstock for the most heavily used nuclear agent in diagnostic medicine.
- Health & Medicine
Smallpox — The Death of a Disease
The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer, by D.A. Henderson.
- Tech
Large Hadron Collider suffers carb attack
Efforts to get the Large Hadron Collider up and running just encountered a temporary snag, according to yesterday's online edition of The Times of London. A crusty chunk of bread “paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.”
- Health & Medicine
Bacteria flourish in favorite ecosystems on the human body
Study offers most comprehensive inventory yet of the human microbiome and a basis for understanding how those microbes affect health.
- Space
A little bit of gamma-ray music
BLOG: Art and science meld during a musical performance for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
- Earth
Nanoparticles’ indirect threat to DNA
Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.
- Humans
Newborn babies may cry in their mother tongues
Days after birth, French and German infants wail to the melodic structure of their languages.
- Health & Medicine
Genome 10K: A new ark
Featured blog: Researchers are working to catalog the DNA sequences of just about every vertebrate genus.
- Health & Medicine
Vaccine may head off genital cancer in women
An experimental immunization can clear up premalignant growths caused by the human papillomavirus in some patients.
- Climate
Kyoto climate treaty’s greenhouse ‘success’
There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).
- Humans
H1N1 vaccine: Counting side effects
Pregnant women are considered at high risk for suffering complications or death from the new H1N1 pandemic swine flu. So they’re near the top of the list for getting vaccinated. A new international study calculates that up to 400 out of every million pregnant women who receive such swine-flu shots will experience a miscarriage within 24 hours. But not BECAUSE of their flu shots.
