Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- 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.
- Health & Medicine
Beneficial bacteria may protect babies from HIV
No one argues that when it comes to feeding baby, mom’s milk is best. But mothers infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, face a dilemma: Because some of their virus can be shed in breast milk, babies risk becoming infected as they drink it. Two research teams are now investigating a germ-warfare strategy to treat such vulnerable infants.
