News
- Health & Medicine
Caffeine may ward off Parkinson’s
Scientists may have found an explanation for why coffee drinking prevents Parkinson's disease.
- Health & Medicine
A vaccine to help ex-smokers
By generating antibodies that neutralize nicotine, a vaccine could keep ex-smokers from getting the nicotine high that drives many of them back to their bad habit.
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Perfect pitch common among the blind
Blind musicians are more likely to have perfect pitch than are sighted people.
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Blame the brain for lack of rhythm
Some people are born with dysmusia, a condition marked by difficulty learning to play music or recognizing melodies.
- Health & Medicine
Boldly into the breech controversy
Addressing a long-simmering controversy, a large new study has shown that in pregnancies where the baby has positioned itself to emerge feet or buttocks first, the delivery safest for the mother and child is a planned cesarean section rather than a vaginal birth.
- Health & Medicine
Cancer cells on the move
A new study suggests how a gene recently linked to liver, skin, and pancreatic cancer also causes an often-deadly form of breast cancer.
- Earth
Problems with eradicating polio
The oral vaccine's live but attenuated virus may in rare cases revert to the disease-causing form, which can then turn up in natural waters even in regions now certified free of the wild-type virus.
- Earth
Infectious stowaways
A new study finds that ballast water can move huge quantities of cholera germs and other microbes between ports around the globe.
- Plants
Lowering lilies on the tree of life
Water lilies may belong on the lowest branch of the family tree of flowering plants, along with a shrub called Amborella.
- Chemistry
Chemistry Catches Cocaine at Source
Scientists have devised a method for identifying cocaine's geographical origin by determining the chemical signatures of five distinct coca-growing regions in the Andes.
- Earth
New database describes all the marbles
Analyses of the isotope ratios of carbon and oxygen in hundreds of samples of Greek marble may help researchers identify the quarries that supplied the stone for some of Europe's most famous statues and architecture.
- Health & Medicine
Gene therapy might keep arteries open
Tiny steel-mesh tubes coated with a DNA-containing polymer could prevent arteries from becoming reclogged after cardiovascular treatment.
