Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
Vinegar: Label lead-tainting data
Under California’s Proposition 65 law, products containing chemicals that may cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive toxicity must carry a warning label at their point of sale. Among such products: pricy balsamic and red-wine vinegars that contain lead. At least some California groceries apparently have taken a conservative approach and post labels suggesting all such vinegars are dangerously tainted. Although they aren't.
- Health & Medicine
H1N1: Call to revise flu-mask policy
Three groups of healthcare professionals sent a letter to President Obama yesterday asking that he instruct his administration to revise federal flu-mask guidance. What these groups want: formal recognition that two studies last month showed conventional surgical masks are about as protective as the fancy — but much more expensive — N95 respirators in limiting H1N1 infection.
- Anthropology
Macaws bred far from tropics during pre-Columbian times
Colorful birds possibly raised for ceremonial and trade purposes long before Spanish arrival
- Tech
House passes medical isotopes bill
A spot of encouraging news emerged yesterday on the medical-isotope front. The House of Representatives voted 440 to 17 in favor of a bill to reestablish domestic production of molybdenum-99. It’s the feedstock for the most heavily used nuclear agent in diagnostic medicine.
- Health & Medicine
Smallpox — The Death of a Disease
The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer, by D.A. Henderson.
- Tech
Large Hadron Collider suffers carb attack
Efforts to get the Large Hadron Collider up and running just encountered a temporary snag, according to yesterday's online edition of The Times of London. A crusty chunk of bread “paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.”
- Health & Medicine
Bacteria flourish in favorite ecosystems on the human body
Study offers most comprehensive inventory yet of the human microbiome and a basis for understanding how those microbes affect health.
- Space
A little bit of gamma-ray music
BLOG: Art and science meld during a musical performance for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
- Earth
Nanoparticles’ indirect threat to DNA
Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.
- Humans
Newborn babies may cry in their mother tongues
Days after birth, French and German infants wail to the melodic structure of their languages.
- Health & Medicine
Genome 10K: A new ark
Featured blog: Researchers are working to catalog the DNA sequences of just about every vertebrate genus.
- Health & Medicine
Vaccine may head off genital cancer in women
An experimental immunization can clear up premalignant growths caused by the human papillomavirus in some patients.
