Latest the journal Nature Stories
Ancient humans made cleavers, hand axes and other advanced stone tools 300,000 years earlier than previously believed, but did not take these tools with them when they left Africa, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature. Researchers from the United States and France traveled in 2007 to an archaeological site along the northwest shoreline of Lake Turkana in Kenya, where primitive stone flakes, two-faced blades and other large carving tools had been...
People with surplus copies of certain genes are much more prone to extreme thinness, as well as a syndrome in children known as "failure to thrive," according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. One in 2,000 people have part of their chromosome 16 duplicated, with men 23 times and women five times more likely to be seriously underweight in these cases, the researchers found. A person typically inherits a copy of each chromosome from each parent, giving us two...
A well-preserved fossil discovered in China provides new evidence that the split between placental mammals and marsupials may have occurred 35 million years earlier than previously believed, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The scientists, led by Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Zhe-Xi Luo, said the discovery fills an important gap in the fossil record, and helps to calibrate modern, DNA-based methods of dating evolution. The...
Archaeopteryx, once believed to be the world's earliest bird, may actually have been just another feathered dinosaur, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.Researchers in China, led by Xing Xu of Linyi University, carried out a phylogenetic analysis combining a newly discovered fossil with other similar dinosaurs and early birds, and concluded that the species should no longer be considered a fully developed bird.If confirmed, the controversial hypothesis would be a...
People living in rural areas are less likely to suffer stress and anxiety than those living in major cities because their brains are wired differently, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.Although epidemiologists showed long ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those brought up in the countryside, the current study is the first to show that two distinct brain regions that regulate emotion and stress are affected by urban living....
In a dramatic breakthrough in the battle against malaria, researchers have identified a low-cost chemical that interferes with a mosquito's ability to detect humans, scientists said on Wednesday.Experts hope the findings could help develop the next generation of mosquito traps and repellents, which could confuse, deter or trap the insects.The chemicals consist of odor molecules that disrupt carbon-dioxide sensors that alert mosquitoes to exhaled human breath, which signals the presence of a...
Scientists on Wednesday said they believed they could explain why Mars is smaller than Earth. They report in the journal Nature that Mars had a growth spurt, developing in as little as two to four million years after the birth of the Solar System, but then suddenly stopped. Earth grew to its full size over 50 to 100 million years, most likely through agglomeration as it collided with other young space rocks. "Earth was made of embryos like Mars, but Mars is a stranded planetary embryo...
A projected wave of extinctions of plant and animal species this century may have been overestimated because the most widely used scientific method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.The scientists said that habitat destruction by humans is driving animal and plant species toward extinction at just half the pace as previously believed.They attribute the overestimation to flaws in the most popular scientific method,...
In a major breakthrough in the field of regenerative medicine, scientists have for the first time created a part of the eye critical for vision using animal stem cells, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The research could pave the way to new treatments for blindness and human eye diseases, and experts say it may even be possible to one day restore vision with transplanted retinas generated from a patient's own stem cells.The researchers, led by Yoshiki Sasai of...
Salk researchers map functional connections between retinal neurons at single-cell resolutionBy comparing a clearly defined visual input with the electrical output of the retina, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies were able to trace for the first time the neuronal circuitry that connects individual photoreceptors with retinal ganglion cells, the neurons that carry visuals signals from the eye to the brain.Their measurements, published in the Oct. 7, 2010, issue of the...
