Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Life
The unusual suspects
With no obvious culprit in sight, geneticists do broader sweeps to identify autism’s causes.
- Health & Medicine
Pesticide in womb may promote obesity, study finds
One-quarter of babies born to women who had relatively high concentrations of a DDT-breakdown product in their blood grew unusually fast for at least the first year of life. Not only is this prevalence of accelerated growth unusually high, but it’s also a worrisome trend since such rapid growth during early infancy has — in other studies — put children on track to become obese.
- 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.
- Earth
Air pollution appears to foster diabetes
Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.
- Health & Medicine
Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF
Robert Edwards receives prize for work that led to 4 million births.
- Humans
Swedish academy awards
As Nobel season opens, one researcher looks back on a century of steadily increasing U.S. dominance.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
