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When we meet new people, we assess their character by watching their gestures and facial expressions. Now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that those nonverbal cues are communicating the presence of a specific form of a gene that makes us more or less responsive to others’ needs. The gene determines which type of receptor a person has for the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin has been implicated in a variety of positive traits, such as trust, empathy and generosity....

Of all the spacecraft humans have launched, there have been some impressively fast movers. But which holds the record? Apart from the wow factor, it’s an interesting yardstick for gauging our capacity to explore the cosmos, from familiar planets to the icy depths of space. But it’s not always an easy quantity to evaluate. For one thing, launch velocities differ from eventual cruise velocities. They also depend on what you measure velocity relative to....

Dear EarthTalk: Has anyone been tracking whether climate change is causing more loss of human life as it gets more pronounced? – Gordon Gould, Compton, CA Researchers believe that global warming is already responsible for some 150,000 deaths each year around the world, and fear that the number may well double by 2030 even if we start getting serious about emissions reductions today. A team of health and climate scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison published these findings last year in the prestigious, peer-reviewed science journal Nature....

For people with katsaridaphobia, or the fear of cockroaches, the common pests are more than nuisances—they are the stuff of nightmares. When some phobics spot one of the skittering beasts they start sobbing uncontrollably, whereas others who have seen them in their homes seriously consider moving. Psychologists can treat such disruptive fears with exposure therapy, in which a therapist gradually presents the feared stimulus to the patient in increasingly intimate scenarios....

Israeli researchers announced this week that they have developed a new technique that may wipe out stubborn bacteria that elude antibiotics. Some infections such as tuberculosis (TB) can lay dormant in the lungs for decades before reactivating and causing symptoms— even after most of the disease-causing bacteria have been leveled by antibiotics. But scientists at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that they discovered a way to eradicate the stubborn bugs and prevent them from suddenly striking again when an individual’s immune system is off guard....

According to Biophysical Corporation, the 250 biochemical markers measured by its assay provide information about a broad range of the body’s organic systems and their state of function. The biomarkers can be accordingly assigned to different categories; some fit into several groupings simultaneously because those molecules play multiple important roles in sickness and health. Autoimmune Illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, lupus and scleroderma arise when the immune system turns its arsenal of disease-fighting molecules and cells against the body’s own tissues....

It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt were an integral part of the people’s everyday lives. It is not surprising then that there were over 2,000 deities in the Egyptian pantheon. Some of these deities’ names are well known: Isis, Osiris, Horus, Amun, Ra, Hathor, Bastet, Thoth, Anubis, and Ptah while many others less so....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Throughout history, epidemics and pandemics of plague and other diseases have caused widespread panic and social disorder even, in some instances, when the people of one region were aware of a pervasive infection elsewhere. In the case of the Plague of Justinian (541-542 CE and after), for example, the people of Constantinople were aware of plague in the Near East for at least two years before it arrived in the city but made no provision because they did not consider it their problem....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ancient Egypt is defined as the civilization which flourished in North Africa between c. 6000-30 BCE – from the Predynastic Period in Egypt (c. 6000 - c. 3150 BCE) through the Ptolemaic Dynasty (323-30 BCE) before Egypt became a province of Rome. Roman Egypt (30 BCE - 646 CE) afterwards fell to the invasions of the Muslim Arabs....

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. THIS QUOTE by surrealist painter Salvador Dal comes to mind when pondering the latest wizardry coming out of two neurobiology laboratories. Before we come to that, however, let us remember that ever since Plato and Aristotle first likened memories to impressions made onto wax tablets, philosophers and natural scientists have searched for the physical substrate of memories....

For astronomers, it’s a magical moment: you’re staring at a monitor, and a blurry image of a cosmological object sharpens up, revealing new details. We call this “closing the loop,” a reference to the adaptive optics loop, a tool that enables telescopes to correct for haziness caused by turbulence in the atmosphere. Adaptive optics essentially untwinkles the stars, canceling out the air between us and space to turn a fuzzy image crisp....

How can Bayes’ theorem assign a probability to the existence of God? Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University, offers this explanation: In the 18th century Reverend Thomas Bayes first expressed the probability of any event—given that a related event has occurred—as a function of the probabilities of the two events independently and the probability of both events together. Take the following example. A patient goes to see a doctor for a checkup....

Circumcision changes the bacteria ecosystem of the penis, perhaps explaining why the foreskin-snipping procedure reduces the risk of HIV infection, a new study finds. A year after men received circumcisions, the total bacterial load in the area that used to be under the foreskin dropped significantly, researchers report today (April 16) in the journal mBio. Anaerobic bacteria, which thrive in limited oxygen, declined most dramatically. Some aerobic bacteria, which need oxygen to live, increased....

As a biological feat, it was the equivalent of an 80-year-old woman giving birth: Because of a mutation, Coleen Murphy’s worms were still fertile and laying eggs right up until the end of their lives. The worms’ impressive performance adds weight to the evidence that the biological clock that rules reproduction is separate from the one that grants us the traditional threescore and 10. In a new study, Murphy, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, showed that long-lived bodily, or somatic, cells in Caenorhabditis elegans, a one-millimeter nematode commonly used as a model for aging studies in labs, activate genetic pathways completely separate from those found in long-lived egg, or oocyte, cells....

By Heidi LedfordPatients who take the controversial diabetes drug Avandia are more likely to have a stroke or heart failure, or die, than those who take a rival drug, a survey of more than 200,000 insurance records has revealed. The finding, published June 28 by JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is the latest salvo in a continuing battle over Avandia (rosiglitazone). It arrives just weeks before a U....

Where am I going? As you’ll learn in this issue, the way the brain processes the straightforward, location-based meaning of that question is just as interesting as its ability to ruminate on the existential meaning of the phrase. Our brain has a GPS-like system that senses where we are and where we are headed. It also factors in the passage of time in its calculations of position, doing so with an ease that leaves us barely aware of the effort....

Dear EarthTalk: I heard someone say that legalizing pot—as Californians considered doing last year—would benefit the environment. How would that be?—William T., Portland, Ore. It is well known that legalizing pot could have great economic benefits in California and elsewhere by allowing the government to tax it (like it now does on liquor and cigarettes), by ending expensive and ongoing operations to eradicate it, and by keeping millions of otherwise innocent and non-violent marijuana offenders out of already overburdened federal and state prisons....

Americans have had a long love affair with their vehicles, but recent social and economic shifts suggest the intensity of the romance is waning, according to a set of studies by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). The absolute number of vehicles in the United States reached a maximum in 2008, just as the economic crisis hit. But in examining trends between 1984 and 2011, an UMTRI study shows the rate of vehicle ownership on a per-person, per-household and per-licensed-driver basis actually peaked years earlier in 2006....

The role of children in spreading the coronavirus has been a key question since the early days of the pandemic. Now, as some countries allow schools to begin reopening after weeks in lockdown, scientists are racing to figure this out. Children represent a small fraction of confirmed COVID-19 cases—less than 2% of reported infections in China, Italy and the United States have been in people under 18 years old. But researchers are divided on whether children are less likely than adults to get infected and to spread the virus....