Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
Experimental drug targets Alzheimer’s
A novel drug reverses some Alzheimer's-type symptoms in mice.
- Humans
Two-fifths of Amazonian forest is at risk
The Amazon basin's forest may lose 2.1 million square kilometers by 2050 if current development trends go unabated.
- Anthropology
Chimps scratch out grooming requests
Pairs of adult males in a community of wild African chimps often communicate with gestures.
- Health & Medicine
Parasite can’t survive without its tail
The protozoan that causes African sleeping sickness can't survive in the mammalian bloodstream without its long, whiplike tail.
- Humans
From the March 28, 1936, issue
A flooded Washington, D.C., a giant stellar explosion, and three new nebulae.
- Health & Medicine
XXL from Too Few Zs? Skimping on sleep might cause obesity, diabetes
Widespread sleep deprivation could partly explain the current epidemics of both obesity and diabetes.
- Humans
Letters from the April 1, 2006, issue of Science News
The prion game I must quibble about the headline of the piece about chronic wasting disease in deer (“Hunter Beware: Infectious proteins found in deer muscle,” SN: 1/28/06, p. 52). “Hunter Beware” sounds ominous, but in order to get the mice to exhibit symptoms after getting muscle tissue from infected deer, it was necessary to […]
- Health & Medicine
On a dare, teen advances medical science
A 16-year-old daredevil inadvertently demonstrated the incubation period of a common roundworm after she swallowed an earthworm that harbored larvae of the parasite.
- Health & Medicine
Meat Poses Exaggerated Cancer Risk for Some People
Animal research probes why a genetic vulnerability renders some individuals especially susceptible to the colon carcinogens that can form in cooked meats.
- Humans
From the March 21, 1936, issue
An arctic myth debunked, a treatment for high blood pressure, and a radio tube with no filament.
- Health & Medicine
Defect Detector: Plugging holes in a breast cancer–gene screen
A genetic test not available in the United States catches many potentially cancer-causing BRCA-gene mutations not detected by the sole U.S. test.
- Humans
Letters from the March 25, 2006, issue of Science News
Bee movie? In the article about using harmonic reflected signals to track bees (“The Trouble with Chasing a Bee,” SN: 1/14/06, p. 23), I thought it was interesting to note that the original technology was created by the Russians as a spy device. The technology is still being used for a form of spying. Dwight […]
