News
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Health & MedicineDoes vitamin A aid learning?
A lack of Vitamin A may cause learning and memory problems, albeit potentially reversible ones.
By John Travis -
Health & MedicineNew role for cholesterol-lowering drugs
Drugs that lower cholesterol benefit patients who have just had a heart attack or chest pains, regardless of the patient's initial cholesterol levels.
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Health & MedicineIt’s that time. . .for heart attacks?
A small study of young women already at high risk of having a heart attack suggests that heart attacks are most frequent when estrogen levels are low, soon after a woman's period begins.
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Health & MedicineBig meals boost heart attack risk
Unusually heavy meals boost a person's chance of developing a heart attack, at least among those people who already have risk factors for heart disease.
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Health & MedicineTeasing out tea’s heart-healthy effect
Drinking black tea makes a person's blood vessels dilate more easily, which may explain why drinking tea can protect against heart disease.
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Health & MedicineNitric oxide may benefit damaged hearts
A small study in mice suggests that inhaling nitric oxide may protect against tissue damage after a heart attack.
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Health & MedicineSputum Test May Predict Lung Cancer
By zeroing in on aberrations in two cancer-fighting genes, researchers have found a marker for cancer risk that could help doctors screen people for signs of lung cancer early enough for treatment to be effective.
By Nathan Seppa -
Materials ScienceTo make bronze, tin flakes do a wild dance
Upsetting some prevailing ideas about how alloys form, rafts of tin atoms jitterbug madly around on a pure copper surface and leave spots of bronze in their wakes.
By Peter Weiss -
Low-cal diet may reduce cancer in monkeys
Researchers monitoring monkeys have seen signs that slashing normal calorie consumption can benefit long-lived primates by extending natural life spans and reducing the odds of suffering diseases such as cancer.
By John Travis -
AnimalsReally big guys restrain youth violence
Importing six full-grown bull elephants into a park of youngsters stopped killing sprees by young males.
By Susan Milius -
TechNovel sensing system catches the dud spud
A new device can detect a single potato that's infected with bacterial soft rot while buried deep in a storage crate with hundreds of healthy tubers.
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AstronomyOld stars shed light on young Milky Way
Analyzing the composition of 70 of the oldest stars in the galaxy—the largest such sample so far—scientists have found new evidence that a generation of short-lived stars that died explosively must have preceded this elderly population and that the oldest part of the Milky Way originated not as a single component, but as bits and pieces that may have taken several hundred million years to form and coalesce.
By Ron Cowen