News

Math

Spheres in Disguise: Solid proof offered for famous conjecture

A Russian mathematician has proposed a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a question about the shapes of three-dimensional spaces.

Health & Medicine

Teen taters, too

The epidemic of adolescent obesity may owe more to a paucity of exercise than to a growing intake of calories.

Health & Medicine

Athletes develop whey-better muscles

Dietary supplements coupling whey and creatine promote the development of bigger, stronger muscles in experienced body builders.

Earth

Prenatal nicotine: A role in SIDS?

New data suggest why exposure to nicotine in the womb can put an infant at greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome.

Health & Medicine

Little vessels react to magnetic switch

Magnets can act like vascular switches, increasing or decreasing blood flow to a region of the body.

Earth

Traces of lead cause outsize harm

Minute amounts of lead in blood are worse for children than had been realized.

Paleontology

Ancestors Go South

A group of new and previously excavated fossils in South Africa represents 4-million-year-old members of the human evolutionary family, according to an analysis of the sediment that covered the finds.

Animals

Chicks open wide, ultraviolet mouths

The first analysis of what the mouths of begging birds look like in the ultraviolet spectrum reveals a dramatic display that birds can see but people can't.

Animals

Fishy Paternity Defense: Bluegill dads: Not mine? Why bother?

Bluegill sunfish have provided an unusually tidy test of the much-discussed prediction that animal dads' diligence in child care depends on how certain they are that the offspring really are their own.

Health & Medicine

Protein Pump: Experimental therapy fights Parkinson’s

Bathing surviving dopamine-making neurons with a natural protein that induces nerve-fiber growth reverses some of the symptoms in Parkinson's disease patients.