A study published today reveals that a common industrial chemical causes sexual deformities in oysters, producing large numbers of hermaphrodite animals. The chemical, nonylphenol, is a breakdown product from a surfactant widely used in detergents, dispersing agents, herbicides, spermicides and cosmetics.

Dr Helen Nice who undertook this study at Royal Holloway, University of London, says, ‘Our results may cast doubt on the widespread use of this chemical in many human products including co

Scientists report in Nature today that significantly fewer asteroids could hit the Earth’s surface than previously reckoned.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the Russian Academy of Sciences have built a computer simulation that predicts whether asteroids with a diameter up to one kilometre (km) will explode in the atmosphere or hit the surface.

The results indicate that asteroids with a diameter greater than 200 metres (the length of two football pitches) will hi

In their quest for a vaccine that may one day routinely protect against heart attacks and strokes, cardiologists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and their colleagues in Sweden have isolated a key step in the mechanism that leads to vascular plaque buildup and blood clot formation.

In mice genetically predisposed to quickly develop atherosclerosis, the researchers were able to trigger a protective immune response, significantly increasing the level of immunoglobulin gamma G (IgG), an antibody

Gonzaga Santesteban, lecturer at the Public University of Navarre, concluded his thesis stating that a generalised recommendation on vine irrigation cannot be offered as the factors involved are diverse: the terrain where the vine is planted, the climate on the zone and the quantity of grape involved.

Problems with irrigation policy

Gonzaga Santesteban has investigated “The effect of irrigation on the quality of the grape and the wine in the Tempranillo variety”.

It

Peering back in time more than 7 billion years, a team of astronomers using a powerful new spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has obtained the first maps showing the distribution of galaxies in the early universe. The maps show the clustering of galaxies into a variety of large-scale structures, including long filaments, empty voids, and dense groups and clusters.

These maps are among the first results from the DEEP2 Redshift Survey, an ongoing three-year project d

Bigger and brighter isn’t better, at least not when trying to view moving objects.

That is the counter-intuitive result of a study performed by a team of Vanderbilt psychologists which sheds new light on one of the most sophisticated processes performed by the brain: identifying and tracking moving objects.

“The bigger an object, the easier it is to see. But it is actually harder for people to determine the motion of objects larger than a tennis ball held at arms length than