Findings have major implications for tobacco control and projected tobacco-related deaths

A new report released today at the World Conference on Tobacco or Health shows that young girls are smoking cigarettes almost as much as young boys. Results also show that girls and boys are using non-cigarette tobacco products such as spit tobacco, bidis, and water pipes at similar rates, and that these rates are often as high or higher than youth cigarette smoking rates.

These findi

Researchers in a University of Chicago lab are peering inside the minds of European starlings to find out how they recognize songs and in the process are providing insights into how the brain learns, recognizes and remembers complex sounds at the cellular level. In a study published in the Aug. 7, 2003, issue of Nature, the researchers show how songs that birds have learned to recognize trigger responses both in individual neurons and in populations of neurons in the bird’s brain.

“We found

A neat fix for ageing eyes could be tested in humans next year. The treatment, which involves replacing the contents of the lens in the eye with a soft polymer gel, could allow millions of people to throw away their reading glasses.

“At first, we see it being used as an improvement to current cataract surgery,” says Arthur Ho at the University of New South Wales, a key member of the Australian government’s multinational Vision Cooperative Research Centre (Vision CRC) that is working on

Our earliest ancestors probably behaved in a much more “human” way than most scientists have previously thought, according to a recent study that looked at early hominid fossils from Ethiopia

Previously skeptical, an Ohio State University anthropologist now supports the idea that the minimal size differences between male and female pre-hominids suggest that they lived in a more cooperative and less competitive society.

The evidence centers on the extent of sexual dimorphism – differ

It´s tricky, this weather business — predicting drought, floods, rain or snow, especially months in advance. But NASA scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., are working to take the guesswork out of long-term prediction.

“We´re researching methods to predict precipitation a season or more in advance,” said Dr. Bob Oglesby, a senior atmospheric scientist at the research center. The key, he said, is understanding how the atmosphere interacts with th

Multiple sensors on ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite have been used to peer beneath a vast pall of smoke above tropical Borneo and detect fire hotspots – known to add millions of tons of harmful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Fires occur often during the dry season on the South East Asian island of Borneo, but it isn’t only the forests that burn. Lowland tropical peat swamps are formed from layers of woody debris too waterlogged to fully decompose. Slowly deposited over thousands