Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Astronomy
Celestial wish list
A panel of astronomers ranks proposed astrophysics projects for the coming decade.
- Humans
Protecting innocent — and not so innocent — bystanders
Technique removes pedestrians from Google Street View images.
- Health & Medicine
Want a baby? Relax . . .
Scientists have just confirmed what obstetricians knew anecdotally for years — that women under stress can have a difficult time getting pregnant. What’s new: Biochemical markers quantified the degree of stress — and potentially the type — affecting fertility.
- Tech
The people’s pulsar
Thousands of volunteers help discover a neutron star by donating the processing power in their idle home computers.
- Tech
Research trials pose challenge to medical privacy
How — or even whether — to share a medical data collected on research subjects poses a growing dilemma. Certainly, doctors would benefit from knowing if their patients had been receiving medicines, physical therapies or dietary supplements. Or if a patient had a history of drug abuse, mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases or engaging in risky behaviors. But in the wrong hands, such sensitive data could compromise an individual’s ability to keep a job — even retain shared custody rights to children during a contentious divorce.
- Health & Medicine
Delivering a knockout
Scientists have finally succeeded in genetically engineering rats.
- Archaeology
Lucy’s kind used stone tools to butcher animals
Animal bones found in East Africa show the oldest signs of stone-tool use and meat eating by hominids.
- Health & Medicine
Spindles foster sound slumber
In “a very clever study,” researchers show that distinctive brain signals help sustain sleep in noisy environments.
- Health & Medicine
‘Miracle’ tomato turns sour foods sweet
Pucker no more: That seems to be one objective of research underway at a host of Japanese universities. For the past several years, they’ve been developing bio-production systems to inexpensively churn out loads of miraculin — a natural taste-altering protein that makes sour foods seem oh so sweet. Their newest biotech reactor: grape tomatoes.
- Health & Medicine
Chicken poses significant drug-resistant Salmonella threat
More than one-in-five retail samples of raw chicken collected in Pennsylvania hosted Salmonella, a new study found — twice the prevalence reported in a 2007 U.S. Food and Drug Administration survey. And where the bacteria were present, more than half were immune to the germicidal activity of at least one antibiotic. Nearly one-third were resistant to three or more.
- Life
Gene licensing stifles R&D
Making research findings private property can stymie innovation down the road, a new study finds.
- Health & Medicine
Drumming up anthrax
Mention anthrax and about the last thing that comes to mind is whether there’s a drum in the room. Yet tom-toms — or at least the stretched animal hides on their heads — can sometimes spew toxic anthrax spores into the air. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently highlighted the case of a previously healthy 24-year-old woman who nearly died, last December, after attending a “drumming circle” in New Hampshire.
