All Stories
- Life
New titi monkey, at last
Travel risks in parts of Colombia had kept primatologists out for decades.
- Tech
Research trials pose challenge to medical privacy
How — or even whether — to share a medical data collected on research subjects poses a growing dilemma. Certainly, doctors would benefit from knowing if their patients had been receiving medicines, physical therapies or dietary supplements. Or if a patient had a history of drug abuse, mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases or engaging in risky behaviors. But in the wrong hands, such sensitive data could compromise an individual’s ability to keep a job — even retain shared custody rights to children during a contentious divorce.
- Health & Medicine
Delivering a knockout
Scientists have finally succeeded in genetically engineering rats.
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Haiti quake reveals previously unknown fault
Scientists say the risk of future temblors in region is unclear.
- Life
How salmonella helps kill cancer cells
A bacterial foe gives the immune system a boost to seek and destroy melanoma. The findings may point to a vaccine for melanoma and other malignancies.
- Archaeology
Lucy’s kind used stone tools to butcher animals
Animal bones found in East Africa show the oldest signs of stone-tool use and meat eating by hominids.
- Chemistry
Superconductors go fractal
Oxygen atoms arrange themselves in a self-similar pattern to help conduct electricity without resistance.
- Life
Orangutans can mime their desires
Animals’ ability to act out what they want suggests an understanding of others’ perspectives, researchers say.
- Health & Medicine
Spindles foster sound slumber
In “a very clever study,” researchers show that distinctive brain signals help sustain sleep in noisy environments.
- Earth
Forest loss slows in Brazilian Amazon
Between 2004 and 2009, the rate of clearing dropped almost 75 percent.
- Health & Medicine
‘Miracle’ tomato turns sour foods sweet
Pucker no more: That seems to be one objective of research underway at a host of Japanese universities. For the past several years, they’ve been developing bio-production systems to inexpensively churn out loads of miraculin — a natural taste-altering protein that makes sour foods seem oh so sweet. Their newest biotech reactor: grape tomatoes.
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