A study presented at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting suggests that female rats who are curious and more willing to step out and explore their environment tend to survive breast and pituitary tumors longer than their more cautious sisters. Penn State researcher Dr. Sonia Cavigelli says that her study of 80 female rats from birth […]
To comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia faces a race against time to dispose of around 40,000 tonnes of chemical warfare agents by 2007. Researchers writing in the Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology believe bacteria may represent an ecologically sound way of doing this. Dr Inna Ermakova and colleagues from the Russian Academy […]
The tiny human discovered in Indonesia and nicknamed “the Hobbit” represents a previously unrecognized species of early humans, say the results of a detailed comparison of the fossil’s brain case with those of humans and apes. Skeptics have to now maintained the fossilized remains were actually those of an individual who suffered from a disorder […]
The volume of cod on the Scotian Shelf has plunged 96 percent since the 1850s, say Census of Marine Life scientists. Their research, published in Frontier’s in Ecology, is based on old schooner catch records and observations, coupled with modern modeling tools. To estimate long ago fish levels, the researchers used 1850s New England schooner […]
While scientists debate whether nanobacteria are acutally biological in nature, researchers at NASA are calling for a major initiative to further investigate these tiny, self replicating agents. These same researchers are authors of a study published inKidney International that says nanobacteria could be a potential cause of rapid kidney stone formation in astronauts on space […]
An object that seems to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter – the first ever detected – has been observed by a group of astronomers using the Lovell Telescope in England. The galaxy, which appears as a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, could only be found using […]
Habitat destruction by human activity and the consequent extinction of species around the world could turn parasites into “evolutionary land mines”, warned a Canadian zoologist speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Daniel Brooks, a parasitologist at the University of Toronto, says the decline of global biodiversity […]
Dark energy may not be responsible for the cosmic acceleration of the universe after all, says New York University physicist Georgi Dvali. Dvali suggests that the accelerating universe may be due to the modification of the standard laws of gravity at very large distances caused by extra space dimensions into which gravity “leaks”. “The accelerated […]
An article in the journal Science suggests that a natural particle accelerator operates in the Earth’s upper atmosphere at energies comparable to bursts emitted from black holes and neutron stars. Occurring above thunderstorms, terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) are very short blasts of gamma rays, lasting about one millisecond, that are emitted into space. The gamma […]
Researchers believe that many rivers and streams in the U.S. contain high levels of a toxic antimicrobial chemical – triclocarban – whose environmental fate remains unknown despite large-scale production and usage for almost half a century. An analysis conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that contamination by triclocarban […]
