A gene called PYHIN1 may account for a surprisingly large proportion of asthma risk in people of African descent, said researchers conducting a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies.
Gotta go for today but cannot miss mentioning the page one story in today’s NYTimes by Dennis Overbye, running under the hed It’s Alive! It’s Alive! Maybe Right Here on Earth. It’s an enterprising story, even if it has no big scoops. Overbye does a fine job surveying a little-appreciated wing of frontier science, one [...]
Three years ago New York City required chain fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts for items on their menu. Now a study by the city’s health department shows that only 15 percent New Yorkers actually read the calorie ratings. But the report says that those who do read the listings tend to favor lower-calorie dishes. [...]
Claimed sightings of cougars have come from several Midwestern and Eastern states in recent years, but often are dismissed as erroneous or implausible. Now there is irrefutable evidence that at least one of the wild American lions has been roaming leafy Connecticut towns from tony Greenwich eastward to Milford. Peter Applebome writes in today’s New [...]
Nearly ten years after New York’s World Trade Center towers collapsed, sending billows of dust and smoke into the city and into the lungs of hundreds of survivors as well as fire, police and rescue workers, there is no good evidence that it caused any to get cancer. That’s the conclusion of a study by [...]
The Russian space agency said Wednesday, according to AFP, that the International Space Station would be scrapped in 2020 and plunged into the ocean to avoid its becoming a source of orbital debris. So, after 12 years under construction and recent assurance from the American space agency that ISS was about to enter a period [...]
Evolution, as many of us know, is happening all the time everywhere. Phenotypes are always being tested by changes in environment. But it’s nice to be reminded that it can happen in the midst of the country’s largest city, as Carl Zimmer writes in this week’s Science Times. Even the ivy-choked islands in the middle [...]Asthma inhalers have a real impact on airways, but the symptom relief isn't any greater than that achieved with placebos, researchers found.