Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
PCBs hike blood pressure
No one would choose to eat polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — yet we unwittingly do. And a new study finds that the cost of their pervasive contamination of our food supply can be elevated blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease.
- Health & Medicine
Heart attack patients get high radiation dose
Medical imaging can add up to exposure similar to what nuclear power plant workers experience.
- Earth
Plastics ingredients could make a boy’s play less masculine
Study links boys' fetal phthalate exposure to tendency toward gender-neutral play later on.
- Health & Medicine
B vitamin outperforms another drug in keeping arteries clear
The findings led to an early halt of a small study comparing Niaspan and Zetia, two compounds commonly used along with statins to reduce heart attack risk.
- Health & Medicine
Changing the paradigm around Alzheimer’s disease
Prevention could begin with lifestyle in younger years, one researcher says during the American Public Health Association meeting.
- Health & Medicine
Chill-out device may protect brain during heart attacks
A portable method to quickly lower body temperature passes safety tests
- Anthropology
For Hadza, build and brawn don’t matter for choosing mates
Study of hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania shows that, across human groups, mating criteria vary.
- Humans
Record chills are falling, but in number only
Weather-monitoring stations in the Lower 48 have been logging record daily highs in temperature at twice the pace of record lows. Yet more evidence of climate warming. Many people have pointed to colder than normal winters — or summers — as evidence that global warming is a myth. Climatologists have countered that weather, the meteorological features that we experience at any given hour or day, may show anomalies even as Earth’s overall climate warms. So weather can locally mask the planet’s overall slowly rising fever. Except that any such mask appears to be disappearing throughout most of the United States, according to a new study.
- Life
Newborn cells clear space in brain’s memory-maker
Rodent study offers first evidence that neurogenesis clears old memories in key part of the brain to make way for new ones.
- Life
Genetic effects suggest FOXP2 role in language evolution
Human version of the protein alters activity of 116 genes compared with the chimp version.
- Science & Society
Why Cousteau’s granddaughter was at a meeting on public health
Philadelphia — On brainstorming possible keynote speakers for a major public health conference, the granddaughter of ocean giant Jacques Cousteau does not exactly stand out. But in Philadelphia on Sunday, filmmaker and diver Celine Cousteau stood before the 11,000 or so attendees of the American Public Health Association's annual meeting to explain just why exactly she was there to give the opening session's address.
- Earth
Buried-lakes story wins top award
Some readers may be unaware of our sister publication, Science News for Kids, a weekly online magazine for middle-school readers. This morning, we learned that one of the site’s feature stories — Where Rivers Run Uphill — won this year’s top science journalism award for reporting news for children.
