Science Magazine News

Scientists in China say they've ruled out reservoir triggering in the disastrous 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. But many earth scientists don't buy their arguments.

Authors: Richard A. Kerr, Richard Stone

Last week's announcement of the first athlete to be caught by a blood test designed to detect doping with human growth hormone to boost muscle mass represents a warning to athletes who may have thought HGH use was undetectable, and it also erases lingering doubts about the test among scientists.

Author: John Travis

On page 1241 of this week's issue of Science, geoscientists report evidence that the tropics hosted glaciers more than 100 million years before the supposed global freeze in which Earth froze over from pole to pole more than a half-billion years ago.

Author: Richard A. Kerr

Researchers gathered at a meeting last month to probe the impact on modern humans of the cataclysmic eruption of Indonesia's Mount Toba about 74,000 years ago—and to ponder whether modern humans had made it to Asia by the time the volcano blew.

Author: Michael Balter

ScienceInsider reported this week that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its parent organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, will request an independent review of IPCC in the wake of unprecedented criticisms of the panel, among other stories.

ScienceNOW reported this week that an early polar bear has been discovered in Arctic tundra, an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin is just as effective as insulin at controlling diabetes in mice, engraved eggs suggest early symbolism, and global warming didn't kill the golden toad, among other stories.

Europe's food safety watchdog on 25 February issued a scientific mass-verdict on more than 400 so-called health claims, the promises that food producers make on their labels and in advertisements, rejecting purported health benefits of a raft of substances.

Author: Martin Enserink

In a packed house at the final Saturday session of the annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, revolutionary new DNA-sequencing technologies using silicon wafers and quantum dots were presented.

Author: Elizabeth Pennisi

Two recent papers offer some of the first side-by-side comparisons of human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and human embryonic stem (hES) cells as they differentiate into various kinds of cells. In both papers, researchers report that iPS cells can form desired cell types, but they do so with less efficiency than hES cells.

Author: Gretchen Vogel

An alternative to juvenile bipolar disorder and a reorganization of autism-related disorders are among the controversial changes proposed for the fifth editionof psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Author: Greg Miller

For a generation, researchers have sought clues to our galaxy's origins in the rare stars whose compositions most closely approach the purity of the primeval universe.

Author: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Presentations at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections challenged the most basic notions of how HIV enters and exits cells. New work indicates that endocytosis may be a more important entry route than direct fusion.

Author: Jon Cohen

At the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, two groups presented some of the firmest data yet to support the concept of testing everyone for HIV and immediately starting all infected people on treatment.

Author: Jon Cohen

According to the best estimates, 480,000 babies worldwide became infected with HIV in 2008, with a mere 21% of pregnant women receiving an HIV test and only 45% of those who tested positive receiving drugs to prevent infection—and that treatment was often suboptimal, according to work presented at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

Author: Jon Cohen

A new effort to nail down the risks of either using or doing without key medications during pregnancy is being launched this week with $12.5 million from two U.S. agencies.

Author: Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

Physicists have been debating the formula for the momentum of light zipping through a transparent material ever since two different formulas were proposed more than 100 years ago. Now a theorist says both formulas are correct, but they denote different things and apply in different contexts.

Author: Adrian Cho

Authors of the latest revision of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) are debating whether the relationship between anxiety and depression is so close that they should be subsumed into a supercategory of human hopelessness, fear, and existential angst.

Author: Constance Holden

Author: Constance Holden

The U.S. Department of Energy has downsized a proposal to train more scientists and engineers to work in a low-carbon economy. The president's 2011 budget request contains a slimmed-down RE-ENERGYSE, with a price tag of $50 million—$35 million for higher education and $15 million for technical training and precollege outreach.

Author: Jeffrey Mervis

ScienceInsider reported this week that the U.S. National Institutes of Health has widened its definition of what constitutes a human embryonic stem cell to keep up with what's happening in the lab and that the new definition would include lines derived from embryos before the blastocyst stage, among other stories.