News
- Health & Medicine
Do more infections mean less asthma?
Young infants kept out of day care and having no more than one older sibling are significantly more likely to develop asthma than are babies who have greater exposure to other children.
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Tales from the crypts: Cells battle germs
Inhabiting tiny pits in the small intestine, so-called Paneth cells defend other cells in these crypts by discharging bacteria-killing bursts of enzymes and other molecules.
- Materials Science
Apollo attire needs care
Advanced spacesuits protected astronauts far from Earth just 30 years ago, but the materials have already deteriorated.
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She salamanders punish fickle mates
Female salamanders get aggressive if the male they share a rock with wanders back after an interlude with another female.
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Social tuco-tucos develop more variety
In mustachioed rodents called tuco-tucos, group life seems to have fostered more diverse immune systems than has solitary living.
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Looking for a mate? Oh, whatever
Two cricket species don't seem to care whether they get mixed up at mating time, an oddity that may have something to do with the female's need to dine on leftover sperm.
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Puppy tests flunk long-term checkups
A follow-up study of dog-personality tests suggests that they don't have the predictive power many puppy purchasers expect.
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Beaks change songs in Darwin’s finches
A new look—and listen—at Darwin's finches finds that the famous relationship between beak size and food supply affects their courtship songs as well.
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Do people flirt like guppies?
Researchers who have studied how female guppies copy other females' choice of mate are tackling the same question in Homo sapiens.
- Animals
Slavemaker Ants: Misunderstood Farmers?
A test of what once seemed too obvious to test—whether ant colonies suffer after being raided by slavemaker ants—suggests that some of the raiding insects have been getting unfair press.
- Health & Medicine
DNA vaccine immunizes fetal lambs
Canadian scientists have devised a way to vaccinate fetal lambs, which could spawn more research into in utero methods for preventing the spread of disease from mothers to their babies.
- Astronomy
Young pulsar has a split personality
A new pulsar, the youngest discovered to date, unexpectedly exhibits properties of both regular pulsars and a recently explored class of supermagnetic pulsars, the magnetars.
