News
- Health & Medicine
Natural antidepressant has its limits
St. John's wort, a popular ingredient in herbal remedies, may not help people with moderate or severe forms of depression.
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Friend or Foe? Old Elephants Know
Older female elephants are far better at telling friends from strangers than are younger matriarchs.
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Radioactive antibodies on the mind
Injecting radioactive antibodies directly into the cavity left after a brain tumor is surgically removed lengthened patients' lives by as much as 40 weeks in a recent study.
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Knotty DNA offers cancer-drug target
Agents that bind to knots in the normally linear DNA sequence seem to prevent the expression of cancer-causing genes.
- Paleontology
Rocks yield clues to flower origins
A distinctive organic chemical related to substances produced by modern flowering plants has been found in ancient fossil-bearing sediments, possibly helping to identify the ancestral plants that gave rise to flowers.
- Paleontology
Fake fossil not one but two new species
A supposed missing link between dinosaurs and birds that was first unveiled in 1999, and revealed to be a forgery soon thereafter, was actually cobbled together from parts of animals from two new species.
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Anticancer mineral works best in food
Selenium's anticancer benefits may depend on ingestion of the mineral in food, not as a purified dietary supplement.
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Keeping antioxidants may spare gut
Inflammatory bowel disease may initially be triggered by chemical reactions that deplete affected tissues of a key antioxidant.
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Pulling antioxidants starves cancers
Realizing that many cancers depend on antioxidants for their survival, researchers have successfully designed a dietary strategy that suppresses breast cancer growth and spread, at least in animals.
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Cigarette smoke worsens heart attacks
Breathing in smoke from another person's cigarette causes blood changes that reduce the likelihood that an individual will survive a heart attack.
- Anthropology
. . . and then takes some lumps
The skeletal diversity that many scientists use to divide up fossil species in our evolutionary past masks a genetic unity that actually encompassed relatively few species, contend researchers in an opposing camp.
- Anthropology
Our family tree does the splits…
Large-scale changes in climate and habitats may have sparked the evolution of many new animal species in Africa beginning 7 million to 5 million years ago, including a string of new species in the human evolutionary family.
