News
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Giving Aid, Staying Alive: Elderly helpers have longevity advantage
Over a 5-year period, older people who offered a lot of social support to their spouses, friends, relatives, and neighbors displayed a lower mortality rate than seniors who gave little or no social support.
- Health & Medicine
Intestinal Fortitude: Treatment for colitis shows early success
Given as a drug, a protein fragment called epidermal growth factor induces remission in people with ulcerative colitis, apparently by healing intestinal lesions.
- Health & Medicine
Promising drug cuts tumor metabolism
Early safety trials of an experimental medicine suggest that it could be used for treating several serious cancers.
- Health & Medicine
Immune test predicts tolerance for radiation
A new blood test can foretell which cancer patients are likely to suffer serious delayed side effects from radiation therapy.
- Health & Medicine
Genes linked to colon cancer take sides
Cancers on opposite sides of the colon are genetically distinct and should be studied and treated as separate entities.
- Health & Medicine
Herbal therapy may carry cancer danger
An herbal extract that some women use to relieve symptoms of menopause increases the likelihood in mice with breast cancer that the disease will spread.
- Health & Medicine
Keeping breathing steady and safe
Scientists may have found a way to avoid the lowered breathing rate that comes from treatment with morphine or other opiate-based narcotics and anesthetics.
- Astronomy
Dusty times on Mars
On July 1, a dust cloud emerged from Mars' Hellas Basin, and 3 days later it had become 1,800 kilometers wide, roughly one-fourth the Red Planet’s diameter.
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Down the Tubes: Amino acid proves key to plant reproduction
An amino acid that human brain cells communicate with also has a role in plant sex.
- Health & Medicine
Metal’s Mayhem: Cadmium mimics estrogen’s effects, thwarts DNA repair
Cadmium causes endocrine disruption by mimicking estrogen in rats and also thwarts routine DNA repair, causing mutations, two studies show.
- Materials Science
Tiny Labs: Polymers on silicon chip catch, release proteins
In a step toward a new laboratory-on-a-chip technology, researchers have grown a dense polymer film on a silicon wafer that takes up and releases proteins on command.
- Animals
City Song: Birds sing higher near urban traffic
Birds in noisier city spots tend to sing at a higher pitch than do members of the same species in quieter neighborhoods.
