Humans

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Health & Medicine

    Getting to the bottom of diabetes and kidney disease

    Renal cells called podocytes may need insulin to maintain tissues’ blood-filtration role, a study in mice finds.

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  2. Earth

    Air pollution appears to foster diabetes

    Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF

    Robert Edwards receives prize for work that led to 4 million births.

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  4. Humans

    Swedish academy awards

    As Nobel season opens, one researcher looks back on a century of steadily increasing U.S. dominance.

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  5. Life

    To researchers’ surprise, one Pseudomonas infection is much like the next

    Consistent genetic changes in the lung bacteria that commonly plague cystic fibrosis patients are a welcome discovery because they may point to new treatment strategies.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Pernicious influences on dietary choices

    Because humanity developed during eons of cyclical feasts and famines, we survived by chowing down on energy-dense foods whenever they became available. Today that's all the time. But a number of recent studies point to additional, less obvious influences on what and how much we choose to eat.

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  7. Humans

    Ancient New Guinea settlers headed for the hills

    Humans had reached the rugged land by sea and quickly adapted to the mile-high forested interior by nearly 50,000 years ago, stone tools and plant remains indicate.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Few Americans eat right

    The Institute of Medicine periodically issues recommendations on what people should eat to be healthy and maintain a reasonable weight. Americans have largely ignored this well-intentioned advice, a new study shows. It reports that “nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.”

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  9. Life

    A thousand points of height

    A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.

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  10. Earth

    Contemplating an Arctic oil spill

    The waters off northern Alaska may be “the largest oil province in the United States” after the Gulf, notes Edward Itta, a native of Barrow, Alaska. He is also mayor of the North Slope Borough, an 88,000-square-mile jurisdiction that runs across the upper part of the state. And in a September 27 videoconference with the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he tried to impress upon the commissioners just how remote his neck of the tundra is.

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  11. Life

    A salty tail

    Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    How the brain chooses sides

    A new study reveals where and how people decide which hand to use for a simple task.

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