Gender slant on hygiene hypothesis could explain skewed disease rates
The “hygiene hypothesis” suggests that increased hygiene and sanitation is linked to higher rates of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders.…
Penile presence makes for abominable affairs
Men are more than twice as likely to continue dating a girlfriend who has cheated on them with another woman…
Hubble snaps most distant galaxy yet
Astronomers have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant…
Couples’ language use predicts relationship success
People tend to be attracted to, and have relationships with, other people who resemble themselves in terms of personality, values,…
Fear of spiders, snakes is learnt… very quickly
A new meta-study appearing in Current Directions in Psychological Science reviews research with infants and toddlers, and finds that we…
Courtship affects gene expression
Some of the mysteries of human mating behavior could now be explained thanks to a new study that shows that…
Naturally quantum critical material identified
In what researchers are calling a “dream system,” an exotic new superconductor based on the element ytterbium appears to exist…
More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth
All life on Earth uses “left-handed” amino acids to build proteins and NASA has now found that a greater number…
Antioxidants causing fertility problems
Antioxidants are a popular dietary supplement but we still don’t have a complete understanding of how they act in our…
High altitude, higher suicide risk
The current issue of the journal High Altitude Medicine & Biology contains an analysis of mortality data that reveals a…
Colored light used to control brains of GM animals
Optogenetics researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have achieved unparalleled control over the brain circuits in laboratory animals by…
Mad cow disease airborne
University of Zurich researchers have discovered that prions – the infectious proteins that can causeCreutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease – can…
Discredited MMR researcher planned business empire
Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced researcher who claimed a link between MMR vaccine and autism, planned a secret multi-national business offering…
Satellite catches thunderstorm producing antimatter bursts
Astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in orbit above the Earth have detected beams of antimatter produced above terrestrial…
Masculinity trumps intelligence for ovulating women
How human sexual selection evolved over time is becoming clearer with new findings from the University of Colorado at Boulder…
CO2 “inertia” makes significant climatic disruption inevitable
The first full climate simulation to make predictions out to the year 3000 indicates that even if zero CO2emissions were…
Benefits of breastfeeding last into adolescence
Breastfeeding appears to confer advantages well beyond infancy, with European researchers reporting significant differences in muscle strength and aerobic capacity…
Size of oceanic plastic patch “grossly exaggerated”
There’s a significant amount of plastic trash floating in the northern Pacific Ocean, but claims that the “Great Garbage Patch”…
Hair color revealed in DNA
The same European researchers who devised a forensic test to tell a person’s age from a sample of their blood…
Mass extinction event linked to invasive species
The arrival of invasive species can stop the dominant natural process of new species formation and trigger mass extinction events,…