Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
Ingredient of dark roasted coffees may make them easier on the tummy
A compound generated in the roasting process appears to reduce acid production in the stomach.
- Chemistry
Cool roof coating: Mechanism kept under wraps
The American Chemical Society held a news briefing March 21 to feature a new energy-saving technology. It’s an ostensibly “smart” coating for roofing materials that knows when to reflect heat, like in summer time, and when to instead let the sun’s rays help heat a structure.
- Plants
Bees face ‘unprecedented’ pesticide exposures at home and afield
Honey bees are being hammered by some mysterious environmental plaque that has a name — colony collapse disorder – but no established cause. A two-year study now provides evidence indicting one likely group of suspects: pesticides. It found “unprecedented levels” of mite-killing chemicals and crop pesticides in hives across the United States and parts of Canada.
- Anthropology
Farming’s rise cultivated fair deals
A cross-cultural study suggests that the spread of farming unleashed a revolution in concepts of fairness and punishment.
- Physics
Next on CSI: Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy
The modification of a powerful chemical analysis technique could make it the gold standard in detecting trace substances.
- Math
Big or small, financial bubbles burst alike
New data from the Frankfurt stock exchange show that fleeting financial bubbles behave according to the same mathematical rules as history-making ones.
- Health & Medicine
Experimental blood pressure drug takes natural approach
Dual-action compound tests well in large group of people with mild to moderate hypertension
- Health & Medicine
Vitamin D is a flu fighter
Japanese researchers offer tangible support for that idea that vitamin D deficiency might render people vulnerable to infections. Supplementing school children with the vitamin, they showed, dramatically cut their incidence of seasonal flu.
- Life
To catch a thief, follow his filthy hands
Bacteria from a person’s hands may provide a new type of fingerprint.
- Psychology
Soothing start to childhood weight problems
Pacifying infants with food may raise likelihood of later obesity.
- Humans
Babies see human hand behind ordered events
Experiments find that infants attribute actions to people.
- Plants
Chemists pin down poppy’s tricks for making morphine
Scientists have figured out two of the final key steps in the chain of chemical reactions that the opium poppy uses to synthesize morphine, suggesting possible signaling strategies for new ways of making the drug and its cousin painkillers.
