Posts

Patients with advanced melanoma rarely live for more than a year after their diagnosis–a prognosis that has not improved for more than 30 years. But clinical-trial results now suggest that a genetically targeted approach could slow the disease’s steady march through the body, and separate research reveals why the latest drug being tested may succeed where others failed.The drug could be the first melanoma treatment to join an elite but expanding list of cancer therapies tailored to a patient’s genetic make-up....

Why is there such chaos and doubt when it comes to parenting? Why, in fact, do most parents continue to parent pretty much the way their own parents did—or, if they disliked the way they were raised, the exact opposite way? Shouldn’t we all just find out what the studies say and parent accordingly? A growing body of research conducted over the past 50 years shows fairly clearly that some parenting practices produce better outcomes than others—that is, better relationships between parent and child and happier, healthier, better functioning children....

More than 200 cases of variant Creutz­feldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow, have occurred worldwide since the 1990s. No accepted treatment exists for the devastatingly fatal disease or any of the others caused by infection with the malformed, malignant protein particles called prions. Giovanna R. ­Mallucci and her co-workers at the Institute of Neurology in London have performed an experiment in mice that could lay the groundwork for an eventual cure....

Since time immemorial the North Sea has gradually eroded the cliffs of eastern England, including those near the village of Pakefield in Suffolk. But 700,000 years ago, the bottoms of those cliffs were riverbeds draining an England that was merely a peninsula of a much warmer Europe populated by elephants, bison and even hippopotamuses. Now archaeologists have discovered proof that ancient humans lived there toosome 200,000 years earlier than they were believed to have penetrated northern Europe....

By Zeeya Merali Researchers have developed a multifunctional catheter fitted with malleable electronics that has many of the necessary tools for cardiac surgery. The semiconductor device may help to reduce the length of heart operations and provide high-resolution, real-time brain mapping. Catheters with inflatable tips are routinely used in heart surgery to unblock clogged arteries and insert artificial tubes. “But those balloon catheters do not have any active surgical power,” says John Rogers, a materials scientists at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign....

Synthetic marijuana, already known to cause a number of serious side effects in users, has now been found to cause kidney damage, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last year, 16 people in six states suffered serious kidney damage, requiring a visit to hospital emergency departments after smoking synthetic marijuana, the report said. Nearly all individuals affected were young males (ages 15 to 33), and most experienced nausea, vomiting and abdominal or back pain, which are symptoms of kidney damage....

Every year Scientific American produces a single-topic issue, and this time we’re tackling the theme of origins: our September issue explores 57 innovations and insights that shape our world today. As an added bonus, we’re presenting several related online-only features, including a weeklong posting of 10 additional origins stories as well as a special slide show. And what better way to launch our special week of origins stories than with one about our own?...

Over the past 15 years the U.S. has spent $1.4 billion promoting abstinence before marriage as a way of preventing HIV in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, according to the most comprehensive, independent study conducted to date of the effort, the money was pretty much wasted. A rigorous comparison of national data from countries that received abstinence funding under the 2003 U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with those that had not showed no difference in the age of first sexual experience, number of sexual partners or teenage pregnancies—all aspects of behaviors that have been linked to a higher risk of becoming infected with HIV....

Space shuttle Endeavour remains on the launch pad today after a series of weather delays nixed launch attempts Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Much of the country is balmy and dry this time of year but precipitation, wind and lightning are a mainstay along Florida’s Atlantic coast, home to Kennedy Space Center. Many satellite launches, including some for NASA, lift off from elsewhere in the U.S., namely Vandenberg Air Force Base in California....

The 2014 premier of The Walking Dead —AMC’s postapocalyptic dystopian television series about zombies—was the most watched cable show in history. There have been a slew of popular zombie films such as Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, I Am Legend and of course the perennial favorite Frankenstein. There is even a neuroscience text on the zombie brain, Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?...

A new digital model of the original grave of English King Richard III offers a three-dimensional glimpse into this humble resting place. Richard III’s lost skeleton was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester in 2012. He’d been buried in a too-short, hastily dug grave after his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. One year ago, the king got a long-delayed royal funeral when his remains were re-interred in Leicester Cathedral....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineMarshalling everything from major radar facilities to backyard telescopes, astronomers are gearing up for a fantastic view of an asteroid called 2005 YU55. The 400-meter-diameter rock is predicted to narrowly miss Earth on November 8, scraping past us at just 0.85 of the distance between our planet and the Moon.Large enough to cause regional devastation if it were to hit the Earth, 2005 YU55 is the closest pass by an asteroid this big since 1976, and there won’t be another until 2028....

Were we to attend a 16th-century court banquet in France or England, the food would seem strange indeed to anyone accustomed to traditional Western cooking. Dishes might include blancmange–a thick puree of rice and chicken moistened with milk from ground almonds, then sprinkled with sugar and fried pork fat. Roast suckling pig might be accompanied by a cameline sauce, a side dish made of sour grape juice thickened with bread crumbs, ground raisins and crushed almonds, and spiced with cinnamon and cloves....

Giraffe Reflections Dale Peterson Karl Ammann University of California Press, 2013 ($39.95) Because the spindly-legged creatures had camel-like faces atop impossibly long, leopard-print necks, Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt called them “camelopards.” They were known as “tsu-la” to the Tang Dynasty Chinese and as “zarafa” to Arabs in the Middle Ages. Today we call them “giraffes,” but our timeless fascination with these majestic animals remains unchanged. Peterson, a nature writer, has teamed with Ammann, a wildlife photographer, to present the natural and cultural history of giraffes in this elegant and comprehensive volume....

David Liu is a technology entrepreneur in San Francisco. He has helped found several start-ups to market products he has developed, including those stylus pens the UPS driver hands you to sign for your packages. But even as he dreams up new inventions, an ongoing patter in his head objects that they are stupidly obvious. And despite his accomplishments, Liu teeters on a mental precipice: “It feels shameful, like, hey, I’m in my early 30s, I should have had a Yahoo by now—or I should at least have had a company I sold for tons of money....

On Sunday, May 31, 2015, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made its latest and final flyby of Hyperion, Saturn’s spongy moon. At around 9:36 a.m. EDT Cassini came within 21,000 miles (34,000 km) of Hyperion’s surface—not its closest approach ever but certainly close enough to grab some fantastic images of this porous and punched-in world. ANALYSIS: Cassini to Get Final View of Saturn’s Weird ‘Spongy’ Moon The image above is a color composite made from images acquired in optical wavelengths (i....

By Philip BallThe idea that neglected environments encourage crime and antisocial behavior has been around since the 1980s. Now, a study shows that messy surroundings also make people more likely to stereotype others.Diederik Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg, social scientists at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, asked subjects in messy or orderly everyday environments (a street and a railway station) to complete questionnaires that probed their judgments about certain social groups. They found small but significant and systematic differences in the responses: there was more stereotyping in the disorderly areas than the clean ones....

CLIMATEWIRE | Parts of South Africa are still reeling nearly a month after heavy rains and catastrophic floods wracked the coastal city of Durban and surrounding areas, killing hundreds of people and destroying thousands of homes. Now, scientists say the extreme rainfall was worsened by the influence of climate change. According to a new analysis by the research consortium World Weather Attribution, the likelihood of an event this severe happening at all has more than doubled because of global warming....

Over the years, coyotes ate many of Michael Soulé’s cats. For most people, this might have been the end of the story, a nasty reminder of nature’s darker proclivities. But Michael Soulé is not most people. Soulé is a biologist. At the time, he was a professor at the University of California at San Diego, living in the chaparral canyons outside the city. He had grown up in the canyons, poking around in the leaf litter, catching lizards....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. If you come across a young cuckoo this summer, you’ll be witness to one of the most bizarre sights in nature. Cuckoo chicks are interlopers in the nests of other species, and can be seen being frantically fed by their unwitting foster parent, despite often being clearly many times larger than their hosts....