Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Psychology
Bereaved relatives helped by chance to view body after sudden loss
Grieving people rarely regret having seen a dead loved one, even in cases of violent death, a British study suggests.
- Science & Society
Intel International Science and Engineering Fair begins
Young scientists converge in San Jose, Calif., where they will compete for over $4 million in scholarships and prizes.
- Space
Asteroid-bound: Scientists look for worthy rock
Scientists consider how to pick a prime asteroid for human exploration
- Health & Medicine
Taste of power goes to the head, then muscles
Just a swish of the carbohydrates in an energy drink can increase muscle performance, a study suggests.
- Earth
Atrazine paper’s challenge: Who’s responsible for accuracy?
As a new critique of a review paper on atrazine suggests, some papers may simply overtax a journal’s fact-vetting enterprise. Which would be bad for science. And bad for society.
- Health & Medicine
Genetic switch makes old mice forgetful
Reversing a chemical change restored the animals’ memory-making ability.
- Life
Neandertal genome yields evidence of interbreeding with humans
After years of looking, geneticists are shocked to find that 1 percent to 4 percent of DNA in people from Europe and Asia is inherited from Neandertals.
- Chemistry
Decon Green can clean up the most toxic messes, developers claim
A new decontaminant could be a more benign alternative for cleaning up after chemical and biological accidents.
- Life
Undereducated immune cells get aggressive with HIV
Scientists discover a mechanism that makes some people resistant to infection with the AIDS virus.
- Tech
A Gulf spill news review
Oil companies have said it's possible the gusher could grow substantially before its capped.
- Health & Medicine
U.S. childhood obesity rate continues to rise
Only a few states buck the trend toward greater weight gain in kids age 10 to 17, a new survey shows.
- Tech
Preventing disastrous offshore spills may require space-program diligence
As crude oil continues to spew from the Gulf of Mexico seafloor — two weeks now after the Deepwater Horizon accident and sinking — questions continue to surface about what went wrong. To my mind, what went wrong was almost blind optimism on the part of industry, regulators, the states and the public. And any niggling doubt about the wisdom of that optimism was likely assuaged by at least a little greed.
