Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
Peer review: No improvement with practice
To keep the quality of what they publish high, journals may have to frequently recycle the experts asked to evaluate incoming manuscripts.
- Ecosystems
Venom attracts decapitating flies
New study may help scientists improve control of invasive fire ants
- Psychology
Rates of common mental disorders double up
New, higher prevalence rates for certain mental disorders fuel a debate over how to revise psychiatric diagnoses.
- Earth
Cell phones: Precautions recommended
Scientists make a case for texting and using hand-free technologies with those cell phones to which society has become addicted.
- Health & Medicine
Monkeys get full color vision
Male squirrel monkeys with red-green colorblindness can distinguish the hues after gene therapy, study suggests.
- Chemistry
Nose knows noxious gases
Dyes on a new sensor react to correctly identify toxic chemicals, scientists find.
- Health & Medicine
Diabetes drugs don’t fight inflammation
Two popular diabetes drugs lower blood sugar but don’t reduce markers of inflammation.
- Health & Medicine
Cell phones: Feds probing health impacts
Senate hearing finds that biomedical research agencies aren't complacent about potential health effects of cell-phone radiation.
- Humans
Citation amnesia: Not good for our health
BLOG: Researchers fail to mention previous publications in findings
- Humans
Reviewers prefer positive findings
Biomedical research journals may be less likely to publish equivocal studies.
- Health & Medicine
Journal bias: Novelty preferred (which can be bad)
Negative findings in a drug trial may seem ho hum, but they're too important to ignore or leave unpublished.
- Health & Medicine
Ghost authors remain a chronic problem
They’re not apparitions, just authors who want to fly below – way below – the radar screen of scientific journals and their readers.
