News
- Health & Medicine
Blindness Hazard: Gene variant tied to macular degeneration
People who make a particular form of an immune system protein have a heightened risk of developing old-age blindness.
- Health & Medicine
Injections cut need for HIV drugs
An experimental vaccine, when given to people infected with HIV, appears to reduce their dependence on antiviral drugs.
- Humans
Death can outdo ABCs of prevention
Abstinence and monogamy may deserve little, if any, credit for the recent drop in the proportion of Ugandans who are infected with HIV.
- Health & Medicine
Inner-brain electrode may curb depression
Deep-brain electrical stimulation has shown promise in treating severe depression.
- Astronomy
Radiation from a baby star
X-ray telescopes have captured the earliest and clearest view of the core of a gas cloud about to transform into a star.
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Master gene found for insect smell
A single gene may oversee the sense of smell in a variety of insect species.
- Anthropology
Inside view of our wee, ancient cousins
A tiny, humanlike species that inhabited an Indonesian island more than 20,000 years ago possessed a brain that shared some organizational features with Homo erectus, a large-brained human ancestor that thought in complex ways.
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Faces elicit strong emotions in autism
Children with autism avoid eye contact because they experience uncomfortably intense emotional reactions when looking at faces.
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Infectious Evolution: Ancient virus hit apes, not our ancestors, in the genes
A potentially deadly infection wormed its way into the DNA of ancestral chimpanzees and gorillas between 4 million and 3 million years ago, thus altering the evolution of these African apes while keeping clear of human ancestors on that same continent.
- Planetary Science
Martian Landscaping: Spacecraft eyes evidence of a frozen sea
After analyzing images taken by the orbiting Mars Express spacecraft, researchers reported that a flat region near the Red Planet's equator holds a frozen ocean that was once the size of the North Sea.
- Animals
Shortcut to Big Heart: Pythons build cardiac muscle in record time
A Burmese python can boost its cardiac fitness—by bulking up its heart muscle 40 percent in two days—just by eating.
- Astronomy
Nursery Pictures: Astronomers glimpse primordial clustering
Astronomers have found the earliest traces of galaxy clustering, from a period just 1 billion years after the birth of the universe.
