All Stories
- Health & Medicine
Natural antidepressant has its limits
St. John's wort, a popular ingredient in herbal remedies, may not help people with moderate or severe forms of depression.
By Linda Wang -
18929
Your article on the importance to an elephant family of having as its leader a matriarch of considerable age reminded me of the postulation that one of the reasons menopause evolved in humans was to allow some women to survive to old age. In preliterate societies, old people were the libraries. Some of the knowledge […]
By Science News -
Friend or Foe? Old Elephants Know
Older female elephants are far better at telling friends from strangers than are younger matriarchs.
By Susan Milius -
Radioactive antibodies on the mind
Injecting radioactive antibodies directly into the cavity left after a brain tumor is surgically removed lengthened patients' lives by as much as 40 weeks in a recent study.
-
Knotty DNA offers cancer-drug target
Agents that bind to knots in the normally linear DNA sequence seem to prevent the expression of cancer-causing genes.
- Paleontology
Rocks yield clues to flower origins
A distinctive organic chemical related to substances produced by modern flowering plants has been found in ancient fossil-bearing sediments, possibly helping to identify the ancestral plants that gave rise to flowers.
By Sid Perkins - Paleontology
Fake fossil not one but two new species
A supposed missing link between dinosaurs and birds that was first unveiled in 1999, and revealed to be a forgery soon thereafter, was actually cobbled together from parts of animals from two new species.
By Sid Perkins -
Anticancer mineral works best in food
Selenium's anticancer benefits may depend on ingestion of the mineral in food, not as a purified dietary supplement.
By Janet Raloff -
Keeping antioxidants may spare gut
Inflammatory bowel disease may initially be triggered by chemical reactions that deplete affected tissues of a key antioxidant.
By Janet Raloff -
Pulling antioxidants starves cancers
Realizing that many cancers depend on antioxidants for their survival, researchers have successfully designed a dietary strategy that suppresses breast cancer growth and spread, at least in animals.
By Janet Raloff -
Cigarette smoke worsens heart attacks
Breathing in smoke from another person's cigarette causes blood changes that reduce the likelihood that an individual will survive a heart attack.
By Janet Raloff -
18928
I’ve often wondered about packing circles and have always assumed that it would get into messy numbers very quickly. Your article is a charming revelation. It says that if a, b, and c are integers, d will be one, too. I think this is true only if a, b, and c bear some relationship to […]
By Science News