News
- Health & Medicine
Stressing out
A gene variant reduces people's response to the stress hormone cortisol, and people with the variant are less likely to have risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.
- Archaeology
Maya warfare takes 10 steps forward
The discovery of hieroglyphic-covered steps on the side of a Maya pyramid has yielded new information about warfare between two competing city-states around 1,500 years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Asthma pressure may shrink airways
Mechanical stress from constricting muscles could cause airway-lining cells to reproduce, eventually thickening the lining and narrowing the air passage.
- Chemistry
Now, nylon comes in killer colors
Chemists are improving antibacterial fabrics by treating them with compounds that prolong their killing power and add color.
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The planet that isn’t
An astronomer has formally retracted her claim that she and her colleagues had likely taken the first image of a planet outside the solar system.
- Astronomy
Observatory on a suicide mission
Fearing that its 9-year-old workhorse, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, could plunge uncontrollably through the atmosphere if one more of its gyroscopes fails, NASA has decided to crash the spacecraft into the Pacific Ocean in early June.
- Health & Medicine
Chemotherapy baldness thwarted in rats
Scientists studying rats have now developed a medication that wards off chemotherapy-induced baldness.
- Health & Medicine
Protein predicts prostate cancer spread
Prostate cancer patients who harbor high concentrations of a protein called thymosine beta-15 in their tumors face an increased risk that the cancer will spread.
- Health & Medicine
Getting melanoma chemotherapy to work
A drug that turns off a gene that blocks the action of chemotherapy in melanoma shows promise against this lethal skin cancer.
- Health & Medicine
High estrogen linked to lung cancer
Estrogen receptors proliferating on tumor cells in women's lungs may account for why women seem more easily affected by the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoke.
- Health & Medicine
Breast cancer options made clearer
An inexpensive test for two proteins in the blood can indicate whether women with breast cancer that hasn't yet spread to lymph nodes are likely to face such a relapse after surgery.
- Earth
Impurities clock crystal growth rates
A novel method for measuring tiny amounts of hydrogen-containing impurities allows researchers to determine growth rates along different directions in a quartz crystal.
