News

Health & Medicine

Worm genes take on bacterial foes

Creatures as simple as worms have an effective immune defense.

Archaeology

Ancient birth brick emerges in Egypt

Investigations at a 3,700-year-old Egyptian town have yielded a painted brick that was used in childbirth rituals.

Health & Medicine

No worry that this secret will leak

The recently discovered protein angiopoietin-1 appears to protect blood vessels from leaking, a finding with implications for research into diseases that involve swelling, such as arthritis and asthma.

Health & Medicine

Lung cancer gene has gender bias

The X chromosome's gastrin-releasing peptide receptor gene is turned on by nicotine to produce a protein that promotes lung cancer, a combination of factors that could explain why women are more susceptible to the disease than men are.

Earth

Just how much do U.S. roads matter?

A Harvard researcher calculates that roads directly influence the ecology of a fifth of U.S. land area.

Ecosystems

Males live longer with all-year mating

Male butterflies live longer in Madeira, where females are available year-round, than in Sweden, where females mature in one burst.

Plants

Why tulips can’t dance

An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.

Astronomy

Milky Way gets a new layer

Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.

Animals

Bees log flight distances, train with maps

After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.