It’s official: English football teams score fewer goals.
Soccer teams worldwide are scoring more goals than they ought to be, whereas English teams seem to follow statistical expectations. The news may delight fans outside England, but it is puzzling the physicists who have found that the chance of a high-scoring game is significantly greater than it may first appear 1 .
John Greenhough and colleagues at Warwick University in Coventry, England, analysed the s
An immune system chemical may undo skin damage by sunlight.
A chemical involved in immune-system signalling may be able to reverse some types of skin damage caused by sunlight. It could reduce sunburn by activating DNA-repair mechanisms, a new study suggests, raising the possibility that the chemical might be used to prevent or treat skin cancer 1 .
High-energy ultraviolet light is thought to promote skin cancer by damaging the DNA within cells. Skin cancer,
Talk about multi-tasking. A new study reveals that in the St. John’s Wort plant, Hypericum calycinum, the same chemical not only attracts pollinating insects but also deters herbivores that pose a threat to its survival. The findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To the human eye, the flowers of H. calycinum appear as uniform yellow disks (top image). Insects with ultraviolet-sensitive eyes, however, see a dark, ultraviolet-absorbing ce
While prion diseases seem to be waning in humans, they could be waxing in sheep.
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) may claim only around 200 victims, a new model predicts 1 . This degenerative brain disease is thought to occur when people are exposed to misfolded prion proteins from meat infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or ’mad cow disease’).
Meanwhile, another study warns that a huge BSE epidemic could be brewing in the UK
Programmed molecules build themselves into a bone-mimic.
Scientists in the United States have made self-assembling synthetic bone 1 . Carefully designed building-blocks join up to mimic bone’s complex molecular-scale architecture, bringing better prosthetics a step closer.
Materials engineers are keen to emulate the strength and toughness of biominerals such as bone, tooth and shell. Mollusc shells, for example, a composite of the mineral calcium carbonate a
Devices with DNA software may one day be fitted into cells.
“If you wear the right glasses, a lot of what you see inside the cell is computation,” says Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Now Shapiro and his colleagues have turned the computational power of biological molecules to their own ends 1 .
The researchers have built a machine that solves mathematical problems using DNA as software and enzymes as hardware. A trillion such biomol
The secret of a steady hand is tightening the right muscles.
Controlling the stiffness of some of our muscles lets us manage tricky feats of manipulation, such as keeping a screwdriver in a screw, researchers have found 1 . We tune the stiffness to oppose motions in the direction of instability, such as the sideways slips that would let the screwdriver slide out of the slot.
Although demanding on the brain, this is the most energy-efficient strategy, say Mitsu
Evolution may make men ignorant and gullible.
Gentlemen: ignorance is bliss and gullibility is the best policy. A new mathematical analysis suggests that evolution favours babies who don’t much resemble their fathers, and males who believe their partner when she says a child looks just like him.
Anonymous-looking newborns make for uncertain fathers. But they also allow men to father children through undetected adultery, Paola Bressan of the University of Padova calculates
Researchers have discovered the mechanism by which the genetic defect underlying cystic fibrosis (CF) leads to fatal bacterial colonization of the lungs. The new findings, published today in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that an aerosol treatment aimed at balancing pH in lung cells could be developed to stave off or delay such infections.
The most common inherited lethal disorder in Caucasians, CF stems from mutations in a gene that
Mount Vesuvius, the volcano most famous for blanketing the towns of Pompei and Herculaneum with lava and debris in 79 A.D., may be sitting atop a reservoir of magma that covers more than 400 square kilometers, a new study suggests. The finding, reported in the current issue of the journal Science by a group of Italian and French scientists, may lead to more accurate monitoring of the area surrounding the volcano.
Building on previous work that suggested the presence of a magma zone underne
Bacteria caught mating with mammalian cells.
Cross-species coupling is generally frowned upon. But in the liberal labs of California it is actively being encouraged. Bugs that are persuaded to get down and dirty with hamster cells are rewriting sex manuals in the act.
Like humans, bacteria mate using a timely protruding phallus. It suckers a nearby bacterium and drags it close enough to shoot in DNA – a process called conjugation.
Although bacteria have been persuad
One gene controls whether a persistent pest serves one or many queens.
A protein that spots smell controls the power structure of fire ant colonies, Michael Krieger and Kenneth Ross of the University of Georgia, Athens, have discovered 1 . One form of the protein leads to nests with several queens living in harmony. The other leaves only one ruler.
Fire ants’ social life is of more than academic interest. The species (Solenopsis invicta) has spread from
Scientists have detected a molecule they’ve been looking for since the 1920s.
Scientists in Italy have discovered a new form of oxygen 1 . In addition to the two well-known forms – ozone and the oxygen molecules in air – there is a third, they say, in which oxygen atoms are grouped in fours.
The oxygen molecules that we breathe (denoted O 2 ) consist of two oxygen atoms. This, the most stable form of oxygen, makes up about one-fifth of air. Ozone is
A gene may protect people against variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
People who lack a gene involved in immune responses may be three times more likely to suffer from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a new study suggests1. The result, if borne out in larger studies, could point researchers toward therapies for the incurable brain disease.
vCJD is thought to occur when people are exposed to misshapen prion proteins from cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy – B
Nerve cells soldered to semiconductors cross computing with neuroscience
Scientists in the United States are soldering nerve cells to semiconductors. Christine Schmidt and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin use a sliver of protein to connect neurons and tiny crystals of semiconductors called quantum dots 1 .
This cross between biology and electronics could have useful applications, including the manufacture of prosthetics operated directly by a
You would be forgiven for underestimating the intelligence of sheep, considering that their daily activities revolve around grazing. But research reported in the current issue of Nature indicates that, in fact, sheep possess more smarts than previously thought.
Keith Kendrick and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, investigated the sheep’s ability to distinguish and remember faces of both other sheep and humans. Presenting 20 sheep with pictures of 25 pairs of sheep
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