To make an omelet, you need to break some eggs. Not nearly so well known is that breaking eggs also can lead to new information about the evolution of birds and dinosaurs, a topic of hot debate among leading biologists.

Drs. Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have done just that. They opened a series of live ostrich eggs at various stages of development and found what they believe is proof that birds could not have descended from dinosaurs. Th

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have demonstrated that sea spray over the oceans contributes to cleansing air that has been polluted overland. The air pollution is washed down by rain, which occurs because the rain-suppressing effect of such pollution is significantly neutralized. An article on this research appears in the online magazine Science Express, published today.

In previous studies, Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of the Ring Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and collea

The white cane used by the blind as a travel aid may be universal, but it is not always adequate when it comes to pedestrian crossings. Although some crossings make a sound when it is safe to cross, many do not, and it is at these crossings that the blind need to know when the green man is showing. Adaptations of the white cane have been made, which use laser or ultrasonic waves to detect more distant obstacles, but they do not give information about the width of the road or colour of the traffic lig

Why are most men taller than women? This age-old height difference persists to this day, according to research to be published in Proceedings B, a Royal Society journal, because taller than average men and shorter than average women were found to be more successful in attracting a mate and having children.

Dr Daniel Nettle of the Open University used data from 10,000 men and women born in Britain in one week in March 1958 and his study concluded that the taller the men were, the less likely

An innovative combination of two medical procedures-gene therapy and radiation therapy–can increase cancer cure rates by significant amounts compared to the cure rates offered by conventional radiation therapy alone, a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) team has concluded. The researchers presented their results last month in Montreal at the annual conference of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

Known as genetic radiotherapy, the combined treatment can potentially inc

For some time doctors have been using a vitamin A derivative, retinoic acid (RA), to treat several cancers, particularly prostate cancer and leukemia, and they are now experimenting with the drug to treat breast cancer. The great drawback to RA, however, is that it requires high levels of the medication in order to turn genes “on” and “off,” often triggering devastating and potentially fatal side effects.

Now, a Cornell University biochemist has learned how to make tumor cells up to 1,000 t