Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Humans
A health-care communication revolution
Discussing how physicians and patients can cure their misunderstandings of medical statistics.
- Health & Medicine
Psychiatric meds can bring on rapid weight gain in kids
Drugs that alleviate severe mental disorders can also result in troubling metabolic changes.
- Health & Medicine
Redefining self, phantom self
Amputees who feel phantom limbs can learn to do physically impossible body tricks
- Health & Medicine
Skin bacteria different in diabetic mice
An excessive number and low diversity of skin bacteria could explain why wounds in diabetics are slow to heal
- Science & Society
College trend: Cut-rate faculty
Among U.S. colleges and universities, tenure-track positions decreasingly represent the norm. “Adjuncts who teach part time are now about half of the professoriate,” according to a series of articles in the Oct. 23 Chronicle of Higher Education. Non-tenure-track faculty may be offered full-time slots and benefits, but with embarrassing paychecks.
- Humans
A gene critical for speech
Scientists argue a newly discovered stretch of DNA essential for larynx development may have allowed the evolution of language.
- Life
Estrogen helps ward off belly fat
Hormone is one reason that men and women carry weight differently
- Climate
Winter forecast: Sustained blizzard of climate news
At least in our area of the country, consumers are already being assaulted — well before Halloween — with Christmas music, decorations and holiday-themed goods. Reporters are smack in the throes of their own early seasonal blitz: News items carrying a climate or global-warming theme. And I don’t expect the crush of climate news and seminars to diminish until around Christmas. That’s when the next United Nations COP — or Conference of the Parties — will end this year’s pivotal round of negotiations in Copenhagen aimed at producing a new climate treaty.
- Animals
Junk food turns rats into addicts
Bacon, cheesecake and Ho Hos elicit addictive behavior in rats similar to the behavior of rats addicted to heroin.
- Earth
Johnstown Flood matched volume of Mississippi River
A modern survey of terrain determines flow rate of the 1889 flood that was one of America's deadliest disasters.
- Life
People can control their Halle Berry neurons
Researchers pinpoint individual brain cells that respond to particular people and objects.
- Anthropology
Droughts gave early humans survival skills for later travels
Droughts were actually good times for early humans, helping to develop skills for survival in other parts of the world, Lisa Grossman reports in a blog from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's New Horizons in Science meeting.
