News
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Where’s Poppa? Absent dads linked to early sex by daughters
Long-term studies conducted in the United States and New Zealand indicate that girls are particularly likely to engage in sexual activity before age 16 and to get pregnant as teenagers if they grew up in families without a father present.
- Plants
Stout Potatoes: Armed with a new gene, spuds fend off blight
Splicing a gene from a blight-resistant wild potato into varieties used for consumption could lead to blight immunity for all spuds.
- Tech
Counting calories on the road
People are programmed to spend about the same number of calories per day—roughly the energy of one hot dog—on daily travel, according to new analysis of British transportation statistics.
- Astronomy
Revved-up antics of a pulsar jet
Flailing like an out-of-control fire hose, a mammoth jet of charged particles gushing from a collapsed star is varying its shape and brightness more rapidly than any other jet known in the heavens.
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- Health & Medicine
Viral protein could help liver therapy
Researchers have developed a method of delivering gene therapies to targeted cells that makes use of viral proteins rather than whole virus particles.
- Chemistry
An inexpensive catalyst generates hydrogen
A new, inexpensive catalyst could make hydrogen generation cleaner.
- Anthropology
Lucy’s kind takes humanlike turn
A new analysis of fossils from a more than 3-million-year-old species in the human evolutionary family reveals that the males were only moderately larger than the females, a finding that has implications for ancient social behavior.
- Earth
Digging for Fire: Burning peat underlies Mali’s hot ground
Superheated ground and smoking potholes in northern Mali are evidence not of volcanic activity but of a layer of peat that is burning 2 feet below the desert surface.
- Health & Medicine
DNA Differences Add Risk: Altered genes show up in Lou Gehrig’s disease
People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are more likely than healthy people to have certain variations in the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) gene, suggesting variant VEGF contributes to the disease.
- Tech
Soft blow hardens Columbia-disaster theory
By blasting a gaping hole in a shuttle wing with a block of foam fired from a gun, a NASA investigative team appears to have confirmed the leading theory of what caused the Feb. 1 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia.
- Earth
More Than a Miner Problem: Asbestos exposure is prevalent in mining community
A new study of the residents of Libby, Mont., confirms that even people who don't work with asbestos can have lung abnormalities caused by the mineral.
