Thursday, 9 February, 2012

When chemicals in the water trigger the endocrine system, male fish can start looking and acting female. What happens once chemicals from plastics, drugs and our own endocrine system are flushed down the toilet? Can we prevent them from entering our streams and harming wildlife?

Neglect, stress and abuse are all more common among the poor. New studies show that these factors can cause long-term changes in learning, brains and behavior, and suggest how to prevent damage in the vulnerable years. Could treating depressed mothers promote healthy interactions with their kids?

Why do women have better sense of touch? It’s all in the size, and big isn’t better…

A new study finds a surprising number of fish, birds and mammals in the oceans 100 and 1,000 years ago. Can this information help regulators slow the decline of important marine animals?

4B years ago, the “late heavy bombardment” burned out all life — or not… High-temp bacteria could have survived in deep rocks.

Did the arrival of 4,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of space junk start the formation of organic molecules roughly 4 billion years ago? “Could be,” says a new study from Japan…

Lenses cannot project a perfect image on the flat back of a camera, so images are distorted at the edges. A revolutionary camera solves this problem by curving the light detector.

Hawaii is the world’s capital of biological invasions. A new airborne gadget measures how bad the situation has become; offers aid in fighting weedy trees.

Japan says it must kill hundreds of whales each year to do “research” on them; but science has plenty of ways to study whales without killing them. Digital-recording tags, whale songs, even whale scats, are the best ways to study these mysterious marine mammals.

Most adhesives can’t be reused. But a radical new design, based on the foot of frogs, lizards and insects, shows how engineers can learn from nature to make smarter materials.