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Three new genes associated with Alzheimer's have been discovered, to the delight of researchers in the field. In two papers published in Nature Genetics, two teams describe how they compared the genomes of sufferers to healthy controls to identify potential gene variations leading to the disease.

Supershear earthquakes are the fastest thing underground -- and they tear along hidden superhighways in areas previously not considered at risk

As if they weren't considered beastly enough, black holes can dive into nearby stars and devour them from the inside out, scientists now suggest. Such invasions by such black holes could help explain the most powerful explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts, whose origins remain elusive.

Bats, birds, box turtles, humans and many other animals share at least one thing in common: They sleep. Humans, in fact, spend roughly one-third of their lives asleep, but sleep researchers still don't know why.

Not quite there yet for human teleportation, but at least they are thinking about it.

"Renegade husband and wife philosophers Pat and Paul Churchland met forty years ago in a college Plato class. Their instincts as philosophers - then and now - run outside the philosophy mainstream. Where most philosophers looked to reason and logic to apprehend the human mind, the Churchlands looked - and look - to science. There is no independent "mind", these two practically say, just the human brain, three pounds of tissue and water, firing away behind all our emotions, beliefs, actions. Consciousness itself, they say, is straight biology, a machine. Once, that sounded esoteric. Now, it's on the frontline of debate over law, soul and life."

The more economically dependent a man is on his female partner, the more likely he is to cheat on her, according to new research.

For whatever reason, from whatever strange motive, scientists have speculated on the question of how our universe will end. It matters not to them that this denouement exists so far into the future that the numbers are incomprehensible in any meaningful way. They simply want to know. They surmise that the universe will end either in a big crunch or a big freeze.

A parody of environmental action sites, this is said to have fooled a fair number of the middle school students who saw it into thinking that they were reading about a real species.

In the past 30 years, a scientific revolution has completely transformed our understanding of babies and young children. Babies both know more and learn more than we would ever have thought possible, and we have recently begun to grasp the mechanisms by which they do this. I wrote The Philosophical Baby to try to show that thinking about childhood can help us answer deep questions about truth, imagination, love, consciousness, identity and morality. Without exaggeration, I believe it can tell us how we came to be human.

"Jewel beetles" are widely known for their glossy external skeletons that appear to change colors as the angle of view changes. Now they may be known for something else--providing a blueprint for materials that reflect light rather than absorbing it to produce colors.

As published in the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, paleoethnobotanist David Lentz of the University of Cincinnati has concluded that not only did the Maya people practice forest management, but when they abandoned their forest conservation practices it was to the detriment of the entire Maya culture.

The shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits. Increasingly, transistor manufacturers grapple with subatomic effects, like the tendency for electrons to "leak" across material boundaries. The leaking electrons make it more difficult to know when a transistor is in an on or off state, the information that makes electronic computing possible. They have also led to excess heat, the bane of the fastest computer chips.

Fermilab physicists are examining the production, properties, and decay of top quarks to gain the most complete picture of the particle possible. They compare their observations to predictions made in the Standard Model of physics and in theories that build on that model.

Scientists may have discovered a way to glean information about stored memories by tracking patterns of eye movements, even when an individual is unable (or perhaps even unwilling) to report what they remember.

Purpose of review: Autism is a biologically based disorder of brain development. Genetic factors - mutations, deletions, and copy number variants - are clearly implicated in causation of autism. However, they account for only a small fraction of cases, and do not easily explain key clinical and epidemiological features. This suggests that early environmental exposures also contribute. This review explores this hypothesis. Recent findings: Indirect evidence for an environmental contribution to autism comes from studies demonstrating the sensitivity of the developing brain to external exposures such as lead, ethyl alcohol and methyl mercury. But the most powerful proof-of-concept evidence derives from studies specifically linking autism to exposures in early pregnancy - thalidomide, misoprostol, and valproic acid; maternal rubella infection; and the organophosphate insecticide, chlorpyrifos. There is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. Summary: Expanded research is needed into environmental causation of autism. Children today are surrounded by thousands of synthetic chemicals. Two hundred of them are neurotoxic in adult humans, and 1000 more in laboratory models. Yet fewer than 20% of high-volume chemicals have been tested for neurodevelopmental toxicity. I propose a targeted discovery strategy focused on suspect chemicals, which combines expanded toxicological screening, neurobiological research and prospective epidemiological studies.

A chemistry professor at Harvard University is trying to shrink a medical laboratory onto a piece of paper that's the size of a fingerprint and costs about a penny.

Many, perhaps even most stars, are members of binaries -- two stars that orbit each other. Symbiotic stars are a small subset of binaries with an attitude: they display characteristic, dramatic, episodic changes in the spectra of their light because (it is thought) one star of pair is a very hot, small star while the other is a cool giant.

As we continue to carry around items that insist on requiring electricity to work, portable-even wearable-energy-generating systems are looking very attractive. A group of researchers has recently looked into the use of piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric field or potential when placed under mechanical stress. By placing these materials on a rubbery or flexible surface, they created a material that can generate the highest rate of energy conversion reported for similar systems. While these are still far from the market, the metrics of the flexible piezoelectrics so far are very promising.

The last thing hatchling dinosaurs might have seen were giant snakes, researchers say. Scientists found the nearly complete remains of an 11-foot-long, 67-million-year-old serpent coiled around a crushed dinosaur egg right next to a hatchling in the nest of a sauropod dinosaur, the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth. "We think that the hatchling had just exited its egg, and that activity attracted the snake," explained researcher Dhananjay Mohabey, a paleontologist at the Geological Survey of India. "It was such a thrill to discover such a portentous moment frozen in time."