News
- Health & Medicine
Alzheimer’s disease vaccine abandoned
Safety concerns forced the shelving of tests of an experimental vaccine for Alzheimer's disease.
By John Travis - Plants
Fringy flowers are hard to dunk
The fringe on the edges of the floating blooms of water snowflake flowers helps protect the important parts from getting drenched in dunkings.
By Susan Milius - Planetary Science
Probing Jupiter’s big magnetic bubble
Simultaneous measurements by two spacecraft have probed in greater detail than ever before Jupiter’s magnetosphere, the invisible bubble of charged particles that surrounds the giant planet.
By Ron Cowen - Health & Medicine
Lack of nutrient turns flu nasty
A dietary deficiency in selenium, an essential trace mineral, may cause a usually harmless strain of the flu to mutate into a virulent pathogen.
By Ben Harder - Health & Medicine
New human virus tied to obesity
Researchers have identified the second member of a class of human viruses that may increase people's susceptibility to obesity.
By Ben Harder - Physics
Magnetism piece fits no-resistance puzzle
Experimenters have found evidence that a type of magnetic behavior correlated with the onset of zero electrical resistance in some so-called high-temperature superconductors is generic to the whole class of those materials, yielding a possible clue to how the substances lose their resistance.
By Peter Weiss - Health & Medicine
Two steps forward, one step back
Just a few days after the National Institutes of Health announced it was canceling a large AIDS-vaccine trial, researchers reported preliminary results from a new vaccine that appears safe.
- Health & Medicine
New drugs help battle HIV
Three potential drugs in development rely on novel tactics for attacking the virus that causes AIDS.
- Health & Medicine
Genes predict allergies to drug
Genetic differences among people infected with HIV might help identify the 5 percent of patients who will suffer allergic reactions when given the antiretroviral drug abacavir.
- Health & Medicine
Is HAART hard on the heart?
Two studies came to opposite conclusions on whether multiple-drug regimens known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) for people with AIDS also contribute to heart trouble.
- Earth
Underground Soil Economy: Microbes hidden in the dirt react to UV boost
The community of soil microbes may live hidden in the ground, but it still changes when there's more ultraviolet radiation above.
By Susan Milius - Anthropology
DNA Diaspora: Humanity may share tangled genetic roots
A controversial new genetic analysis concludes that Homo sapiens evolved by expanding out of Africa in multiple waves beginning at least 600,000 years ago and then interbreeding, rather than totally replacing close relatives such as the Neandertals.
By Bruce Bower