Science News

An all-star panel of researchers says it was the crash of a giant asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs.

In 1980, Louis Alvarez and his son Walter published a paper blaming the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago on an asteroid impact. The probable crater was later found at Chicxulub, Mexico, and the idea gained wide scientific acceptance.

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First it was just swatting. Then poison. Then sterilizing males. Now it’s grounding females. Is there anything people won’t try in the war against mosquitoes?

It’s the females that do the biting, but if they can’t fly they can’t zoom in on their victims. They would be expected to die quickly on the ground, researchers suggest in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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A newfound brain mechanism erases memories on purpose to help make way for new ones. Scientists suggest it could lead to the development of memory-erasing drugs that make a person forget certain things.

Both notions suggested that forgetting is a passive mechanism, but now it seems “its not that at all - its an active system to erase memory, completely independent from the mechanisms to form memories,” researcher Yi Zhong, a neurogeneticist at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, told LiveScience.

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Stuttering may have genetic underpinnings, according to a new study. For the first time, scientists have identified specific genetic alterations that they believe play a key role in giving rise to the speech disorder.

“For hundreds of years, the cause of stuttering has remained a mystery for researchers and health care professionals alike, not to mention people who stutter and their families,” said Dr.

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Why people stutter has long been a medical mystery, with the condition blamed over the years on emotional problems, overbearing parents and browbeating teachers. Now, for the first time, scientists have found genes that could explain some cases of stuttering.

Researchers taking part in a government-funded study discovered mutations in three genes that appear to cause the speech problem in some people.

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Three genes linked to a rare metabolic disorder may also cause some cases of stuttering, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that could lead to a new treatment for the speech condition.

“This is the first study to pinpoint specific gene mutations as the potential cause of stuttering, a disorder that affects 3 million Americans,” Dr.

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Lung cancer is often dramatically different in women than it is in men, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday in another study that suggests ways to tailor treatment for cancer patients.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the latest in a string of experiments that show cancer is far more complex genetically than doctors dreamed of even a few years ago.

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Researchers say theyve discovered genetic traits in mothers and fetuses that appear to boost the risk of premature labor and delivery.

“A substantial body of scientific evidence indicates that inflammatory hormones may play a significant role in the labor process,” Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher, acting director of the U.

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The slowdown in global warming in the last few years may have been caused by a decline in water vapor in the stratosphere, a new report suggests.

Balloon and satellite observations show the amount of water vapor in a layer about 10 miles high declined after 2000. The stratosphere extends from about eight to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface.

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New technology has made it possible, for the first time, to track the potentially deadly bacteria MRSA around the world or from one person to another, a new study reports.

“This is the first demonstration of a new approach to genome sequencing,” Stephen Bentley, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England and senior author of the study, said during a Wednesday teleconference.

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