News
- Humans
Doctoral seesaw
Throughout most of the 1990s, the number of doctoral degrees that U.S. universities awarded in science and engineering climbed steadily, to 27,300 in 1998, but by 2001, the number had dropped to 25,500, the lowest number since 1993.
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Feline Finding: Mutations produce black house cats, jaguars
Mutations in two different genes, which lead to black fur in house cats, jaguars, and jaguarundis, may have protected the black felines from an epidemic long ago.
- Health & Medicine
Miscarriages foretell heart trouble
Women who spontaneously lose one or more fetuses during early pregnancy are about 50 percent more likely than other women to later suffer ischemic heart disease.
- Health & Medicine
Pregnancy Woe Uncovered: Protein may underlie preeclampsia
New evidence links a placental protein to preeclampsia symptoms and may lead to new ways of detecting and treating the disease.
- Health & Medicine
Portrait of a cancer drug at work
Newly revealed protein structures show how a breast cancer drug functions.
- Health & Medicine
Why beer may deter blood clots
Downing a beer a day alters the structure of fibrinogen, a blood protein active in clotting.
- Archaeology
Grave surprise rises in Jamestown fort
Excavations in the 17th-century fort at Jamestown, Va., have yielded a grave containing the skeleton of a high-ranking male colonist.
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Sleepers yield memorable brain images
Rapid-eye-movement sleep may help consolidate some newly acquired memories, brain scans suggest.
- Astronomy
Dead stars may masquerade as ingenues
A heavenly deception in which dead stars lie about their ages could throw into disarray theories describing some of the densest objects in the cosmos.
- Health & Medicine
Edible vaccine spawns antibodies to virus
Genetically engineered potatoes can deliver an edible vaccine against Norwalk virus, a common diarrhea-causing pathogen.
- Earth
Greenland’s ice is thinner at the margins
The central portion of Greenland's ice sheet is, on the whole, not getting any thinner, but most margins of the ice sheet are thinning substantially and contributing to rising sea levels.
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E. coli toxin shows its deadly touch
A toxin from a bacterium that causes food poisoning appears to kill cells by interacting with a protein called Bcl-2.
