Biology
The sex lives of wild crickets
As the seasons heat up annually, males and females start looking for mates, and two summers' worth of steamy drama outside of a small European town have now been caught on tape.
Stories by Katherine Harmon
The Sciences
What's next for synthetic life?
COLD SPRING, N.Y.— J. Craig Venter and his colleagues recently announced that they had created the first cell to run on a fully artificial genome.
Deadly Pandemic
Notwithstanding the tameness of H1N1, influenza viruses could still wipe out millions and wreak economic havoc
The Sciences
Microscopic Giants
Mat of microbes the size of Greece discovered on seafloor
Pacific Earthquake
Will the overdue Big One tear California asunder?
Health
Old oyster shells reveal dry, salty details of Jamestown settlers' hardships
What can a handful of old oyster shells reveal about the trials some of the New World's early European settlers? A lot, it turns out.
As a prevalent resource in the Chesapeake Bay, eastern oysters ( Crassostrea virginica ) ended up being a crucial food source for the first full-time European settlers in North America, who arrived in 1607, the second year of a seven-year drought that was the worst the region had seen in some 800 years...
Herbal Supplement Sellers Dispense Dangerous Advice, False Claims
Undercover government employees received consistently false information when shopping for supplements, and analyses show most supplements contain trace amounts of contaminants
Health
Failure to brush your teeth twice a day increases risk of heart disease
Never mind your dentist. Your cardiologist might want you to brush your teeth more often.
Neglecting to brush twice a day could lead to a 70 percent increased risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a new large population-based study...
Ecology
Scientists scrap over the place of "Ardi" in the trees--and in the primate family tree
A set of descriptions last year of a 4.4-million-year-old hominid dubbed Ardipithecus ramidus pegged the primate as a human ancestor that lived in ancient African woodlands.
Biology
Tiny radio transmitters track flight of tropical orchid bees
Rare tropical orchids can be few and far between in the wild, often separated by spotty landscape and human-made obstacles. But powerful tropical orchid bees do the leg—or wing—work, flying great distances to pollinate isolated flowers and keep the flora gene pool fresh...
Health
Unlocking the Chemistry of Exercise: How Metabolites Separate the Physically Fit from Unfit
A screening of hundreds of metabolites in the blood plasma of people at rest and after exercise paints a newly detailed picture of changes within the body--and reinforces links with metabolic and cardiovascular diseases...
The Sciences
Small Triceratops relative suggests new dinosaur migration routes from Asia to Europe
Some 100 million to 65 million years ago, when Europe was an island archipelago, a small horned dinosaur roamed what is now Hungary. Fossil remains from this tiny dinosaur represent the first ceratopsian found in Europe and shed new light on the distribution and movement of dinosaurs during that period...
Evolution
Mineral Isotopes Could Reveal Whether Dinosaurs Were Cold- or Warm-Blooded
A new method allows researchers to find the internal body temperature of long-dead animals by examining chemical bonds in their teeth or bones. Will dinosaurs be next?
Health
Inhaled chemo cocktail might fight lung cancer better
Lung cancer affects both smokers and nonsmokers, killing more than half of the people who get it within five years. It has been notoriously hard to treat, frequently resulting in widespread resistance and nasty side effects from high doses of drugs...
Health
New Mass-Screening Method Finds Additional Environmental Risks for Diabetes
The first environment-wide association study borrows from genomics to reveal new leads in major complex diseases
Health
Nonexpert treatment shown to be more effective than primary care in soothing widespread anxiety
NEW YORK—One-size-fits-all treatments are particularly rare in the mental health world, where each patient's ailments can seem unique.
But a team of researchers seems to have found a therapeutic model to treat anxiety disorders as wide-ranging as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social phobia and panic disorder...
Health
Thousands of new drug leads identified in the fight against malaria
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, and the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is behind a majority of those deaths. Although newer drug combinations (of artemisinins) proved effective after resistance to widely used treatments appeared, hints of resistance to this newer therapy are also beginning to emerge, creating a darkening cloud over a field already beset with challenges...
Tech
12 Events That Will Change Everything
In addition to reacting to news as it breaks, we work to anticipate what will happen. Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050
Mind
Fact or Fiction: Fathers Can Get Postpartum Depression
Mothers are at higher risk for depression during and after pregnancy--and many continue to have depressive symptoms even as children grow up. But are fathers, whose bodies do not go through all of the same biological changes, also at risk for prenatal and postpartum depression?...
Health
It's getting better all the time: Happiness, well-being increase after 50
Despite weighty concerns such as aging, planning for retirement or caring for older friends and family, people in the U.S. seem to get happier with age.
