New computer programme could settle literary debates.

To date, unlike us, computers have struggled to differentiate a page of Jane Austen from one by Jackie Collins. Now researchers in Italy have developed a program that can spot enough subtle differences between two authors’ works to attribute authorship 1 .

The program can tell a text by Machiavelli from one by Pirandello, Dante or a host of other great Italian writers. It constructed a language tree of the

Argon traces keep tabs on climate change.

A new method for detecting tiny quantities of a rare form of the element argon may help oceanographers to trace the vast undersea currents that regulate our planet’s climate.

The technique can pick out one atom of the rare isotope argon-39 (39Ar) amid 10 million billion other atoms. That’s equivalent to detecting less than a litre of water in America’s 300-mile Lake Michigan.

Philippe Collon, a nuclear physicist at the Lamon

Genes mean ladies like friends and partners that smell like their father.

Bachelors – ditch the Old Spice and don your prospective father-in-law’s clothes. Women prefer the scent of their dad, a study shows, and may choose their friends and partners accordingly.

Nervous new boyfriends can live or die by the nod of a date’s daunting dad. But Carole Ober and her team at the University of Chicago in Illinois have found a more fundamental fatherly influence: women prefe

Few things appear as delicate as a spider’s web, each gossamer strand one-tenth the width of a human hair. Yet pound for pound, the sturdiest spider silks are stronger than steel and stretchier than nylon. With such remarkable properties, it’s no wonder that researchers have made numerous attempts to synthesize spider silk for industrial and medical applications. (Efforts to farm the arachnids have failed as a result of their territorial nature.) Indeed, in the words of one scientist, this

The herbal extract, butterbur, is as effective as antihistamines for treating hay fever, and does not have the sedative effects often associated with these drugs, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.

Researchers in Switzerland identified 125 patients with a history of hay fever. Patients received either butterbur extract tablets or a commonly used non-sedating antihistamine (cetirizine) as recommended by the manufacturers.

After two weeks, the effects of butterbur and cetirizine were s

Scientists believe that they have found a chemical responsible for increasing cardiovascular risk, it was revealed. And crucially they have identified how it is made and destroyed in the body raising the possibilty that new drugs to reduce the risk of heart disease are around the corner. A team of scientists based at the new British Heart Foundation (BHF) Laboratories at UCL first identified ADMA as a naturally occurring substance that blocks the production of a gas made by the body – Nitric Oxide. N