Common viral infections in early childhood do not protect against allergy, concludes research in Thorax. If anything, the evidence points to an increased risk.
The findings contradict the increasingly popular if general theory that the rise in prevalence of allergies and asthma is partly attributable to the fact that children are less frequently exposed to viral infections early in life – the so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis.’
The research focused on 889 pregnant Danish women, who wer
Peptic ulcer surgery seems to increase the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, finds research in the Journal of Clinical Pathology.
Pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of death from cancer, largely because the prognosis is so poor.
Dutch researchers monitored the progress of 2633 patients who underwent surgery for the removal of a peptic or duodenal ulcer between 1931 and 1960. A preliminary analysis suggested that these patients had double the risk of developing pancrea
The most comprehensive picture yet of how dinosaurs evolved has been produced by a team at Bristol University.
More than 1,000 species of dinosaurs have been named since the first skeletons were dug up in the 19th century, and unravelling their patterns of evolution has been a major area of research.
Since 1980, over 150 evolutionary trees of dinosaurs have been published, most of them looking at small groups of species. The Bristol researchers have put all of these smaller
A woman’s fertility starts declining as early as her late 20s – not in her 30s as was previously thought, according to a study published today (Tuesday 30 April) in Human Reproduction*, Europe’s leading journal of reproductive medicine.
The finding comes from a US-Italian study of 782 healthy couples who were using natural family planning methods to avoid pregnancy.
US-based lead author Dr David Dunson said that, to his knowledge, this was the first study to observe that a woman’s fertil
Succession of relationships keeps heavenly bodies young
Astronomers have uncovered a scandalous degree of promiscuity in the cosmos. Clusters where stars gather more densely than usual are veritable hotbeds of partner-swapping. Some stars engage in half a dozen or so relationships during their lifetime 1 .
Star clusters range from loose groups of ten thousand or so stars to dense globular clusters of a million or more. They exist throughout galaxies like ours
Animals may have beaten upright plants to land.
The oldest fossils of footprints ever found on land hint that animals may have beaten plants out of the primordial seas. Lobster-sized, centipede-like animals made the prints wading out of the ocean and scuttling over sand dunes about 530 million years ago. Previous fossils indicated that animals didn’t take this step until 40 million years later.
“It’s staggering that we thought for all this time that animals appeared on land
Spin-off company offers a tiny solution for a big problem. The first sign of spoilage in many food products is the formation of free radicals, which reduces the shelf-life and…
MPI-M researchers and their partner institutions are currently performing atmospheric measurements over the equatorial Atlantic with eight coordinated measurement campaigns. They want to find out what controls the structure of…
Atomic clocks have been used for decades – but now, even greater precision has become possible: TU Wien (Vienna) and JILA/NIST are presenting the w For many years, scientists all…
The sensor could serve as a low-cost and efficient tool for early detection of neurological disorders and conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and depression. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter in our…
Nuclear parasites in deep-sea mussels. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology reveal how a bacterial parasite thrives inside the nuclei of deep-sea mussels. Most animals live in…
Bonn researchers find causative mutations in the keratin 31 gene for the dominantly-inherited form of monilethrix – From infancy and usually for life, some families suffer from broken hair due…
Energy storage systems of the future must be cost-effective and sustainable. To achieve this, it is crucial that the materials used are both readily available and recyclable. A research team…
Researchers at Tohoku University have successfully increased the capacity, lifetime durability, and cost-effectiveness of a capacitor in their pursuit of a more power-efficient future. A capacitor is a device used…
Fungi have more to offer than meets the eye. Their thread-like cells, which grow extensively and out of sight underground like a network of roots, offer huge potential for producing…
A new Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and led by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, was awarded $14.4 million over four years to advance manufacturing…
Together with 24 German research institutions and companies under the coordination of Forschungszentrum (FZ) Jülich, Fraunhofer IPMS is working on an integrated German quantum computer based on superconducting quantum chips…
Automatic image recognition to identify types of wood. The new European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is intended to prevent goods marketed in the EU from contributing to the spread of deforestation….