Naked Science News

The markings of a dinosaur mapped out

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 13:58:44 +0000

By comparing tiny pigment particles between modern-day birds and fossils, researchers have rediscovered the colours of a dinosaur that existed 150 million years ago. And they weren't just ginger. Rep...

What do mosquitoes smell?

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 09:40:13 +0000

Scientists have discovered the specific odour receptors used by the malaria-spreading mosquito species Anopheles gambiae to hunt down humans. A paper in this week's Nature sets out an ingenious stra...

How sperm get turned on

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 09:09:57 +0000

Scientists have discovered the mechanism that starts sperm swimming once they exit the male. Most people regard sperm as tiny swimming cells that vigorously dash about in search of eggs. But, in rea...

Chemical keeps nerve connections alive

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 08:46:01 +0000

Scientists have found the neurological equivalent of the water that keeps a cut flower alive. For many years it's been known that cutting a nerve causes the sectioned part of the cell to die, a proces...

The Fish with wonky mouths

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:24:10 +0000

Among the enormous diversity of cichlid fish living in Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa, one group in particular has evolved a most unusual feeding habit: they sneak up behind other fish and pick th...

The echoing links between bats and dolphins

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:19:13 +0000

Bats and dolphins may appear to be very different types of mammals - after all one of them flies and the other swims - but it turns out they have both, independently evolved exactly the same gene that...

The Benefits of Running Barefoot

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:22:09 +0000

People who run barefoot learn to minimise impact shock, adopting a different style of running from those in shoes, according to research published in Nature this week. This could help us to unde...

Scanning for Cancer's Biochemical Signature

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:12:09 +0000

Researchers in the states may have found a way to detect potential prostate tumours using Magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and this should lead to fewer false negatives, better precision when locating...

Mysteries of Madagascar's wildlife solved

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:15:16 +0000

Over 80% of the plants and over 90% of animals that live in Madagascarare found nowhere else on the planet. The big Malagasy mystery is how did all these species get there? Now,a new stud...

Crafty plants pick and choose their pollinators

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:55:28 +0000

Plants get up to all sorts of clever tricks to persuade animals to pay a visit and pollinate their flowers. Many animals are tempted by delicious smells and a reward of sugary, energy-rich nectar. B...

Human spatial memory based on a grid system

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:45:10 +0000

Scientists have discovered that, at least when it comes to finding our way around, humans use the same neurological mapping system as rats and mice! Studies on human volunteers carried out by UCL sc...

Infected cells bounce away incoming viruses to accelerate spread

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:36:48 +0000

Scientists have discovered a trick used by some viruses to speed up the rate at which they spread - infected cells bounce incoming viruses away towards new cells. Using video recordings, Imperial-ba...

Copper-powered carbon sequestration

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:42:24 +0000

We've heard about carbon sequestration, deep beneath the Earth, but now here's another way of dealing with the CO2 problem - with copper. Part of the reason that CO2 is a problem is that it's quite t...

Why rare objects are harder to find

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:18:36 +0000

Scientists have uncovered the scientific reason why hunting for a needle in a haystack is so hard -and often fruitless. If you'rea little bit scatterbrained when it comes to organising&n...

Fertile females increase male testosterone levels

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:56:52 +0000

Scientists have found that the male arousal hormone, testosterone, peaks in line with a woman's fertility. Writing in the journal Psychological Science, Florida State University researchers Saul Mil...

Growing umbilical cord blood stem cells

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:50:48 +0000

Scientists have discovered a way to dramatically boost the numbers of stem cells used for bone marrow transplants. The technique uses stem cells known as CD34 cells, which are present in the blood o...

Melting diamond

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:44:57 +0000

Diamond is a material which has been known about and studied for thousands of years. But,surprisingly, no-one has been able to measure its melting point up until now. The problem is that diamo...

Spiking Cells

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:42:40 +0000

A living cell is an immensely complicated chemical machine, working with thousands of interacting molecules, and we haven't got an instruction manual. Usually, if you're given a machine you don't un...

Why Light Makes Migraines Worse...

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:55:58 +0000

Scientists have discovered why light makes migraines worse, and the key to the breakthrough was the observation that some blind people also get relief by retreating to somewhere dark. Rodrigo Noseda ...

Repairing Aldehyde Dehydrogenase 2 - ALDH2

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:51:07 +0000

Scientists have found a way to repair the activity of a defective enzyme that prevents some people breaking down alcohol and which may also hold the key to preventing heart attacks and Alzheimer's dis...

Keeping Cleaner Fish in Check

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:35:43 +0000

Have you ever caught someone just before they say something embarrassing? Did you give them a playful elbow? Well, it turns out that cleaner fish do something quite similar. Cleaner fish ...

Nothing like a good pair of nitric oxide socks

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:19:08 +0000

During these cold winter months you might like to strap yourself into some lovely fluffy socks, perhaps that your granny made you at Christmas. And now you can get special socks for donor organs...

Wet World - Planet made of Water

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:59:17 +0000

Over the last few years astronomers have discovered over 400 planets outside our solar system. Most of these are large gas giant planets similar to Jupiter or Uranus and most of them orbit close to th...

Deep Water Submarine Volcanoes: First Eruption Footage

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:25:17 +0000

For the first time, scientists have caught on camera an erupting underwater volcano. The spectacular footage shows enormous glowing bubbles of lava, 1m across, bursting into the Pacific Ocean and la...

Cultural difference between left and right

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:12:56 +0000

The way we remember dance moves reveals the incredible flexibility of the human brain, according to research published in Current Biology this week. Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Research Group for C...

Tracking genetic changes in cancer

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:08:56 +0000

The first comprehensive analyses of cancer genomes have been published in the journal Nature this week. The research, led by teams at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, has been called "truly groun...

Why koalas took to eucalyptus

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:55:12 +0000

Koalas, those dozy, lovable emblems of Australia, look like teddy bears but being marsupials are only very distantly related to real bears. A new study sheds light on the little-known evolution of koa...

Computer model gets to heart of blocked artery problem

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:11:52 +0000

A new computer model promises to dramatically improve the outcomes when clogged heart arteries are unblocked and propped open with metal stents.The process of treating heart disease like this, with a...

Soy stops breast cancer recurrence

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:05:18 +0000

Women who eat soy products are much less likely to die from or develop a recurrence of breast cancer. A paper in JAMA by Xiao Shu and colleagues followed up over 5000 Chinese breast cancer survivors ...

Read my words

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:51:21 +0000

New computer software can read a book's literary fingerprint that is unique to the author who wrote it.It turns out that as books get longer, even the very best writers eventually start to run out of...

A fishy case of mistaken identity

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:43:36 +0000

An endangered fish in the North Atlantic could be in even more trouble than previously thought because it turns out that for a long time it has been mixed up with another, less-threatened species.Whi...

Feeding the birds creates a new species

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 16:38:32 +0000

Scientists studying migratory birds in Europe have found that people in the UK feeding their feathered friends has resulted in at least one group of avians taking the first steps to becoming a new sp...

Mobile phones off the hook as cause of brain cancer?

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 16:29:30 +0000

A large study of brain cancer cases has failed to find any increase in line with mobile phone use.Writing in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Danish Cancer Society scientist Isabelle De...

New way to lock up carbon dioxide

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 16:21:51 +0000

Scientists may have found a much more cost-effective way to extract the CO2 from exhaust gases.With Copenhagen just around the corner the attention of the world is firmly fixed on the question of cle...

Hitting hepatitis C

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 16:04:06 +0000

Researchers have discovered a new way to combat heapatitis C, a chronic liver infection linked to cirrhosis and cancer. Writing in Science, Southwest National Primate Research Center scientist Robert...

Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 18:43:48 +0000

Researchers from Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, have made a step forward in understanding how aggression may be hardwired into the genes, at least for fruit flies.This is research f...

Progress in cystic fibrosis

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 18:42:41 +0000

Researchers in California have discovered a way to partially repair damaged lung cells from patients with cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that affects more than 70,000 people around the world. ...

Cells re-write genetic code to defend themselves

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:42:28 +0000

Following the genetic code faithfully was thought to be a sacrosanct cellular rule, but apparently not at times of stress, scientists have shown.Writing in Nature, University of Chicago researcher Ta...

Brain carries built-in suffocation-sensor

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:37:06 +0000

Scientists have discovered that the brain has a built in carbon-dioxide monitor to signal suffocation. The finding could hold the key to aiding sufferers of panic and anxiety disorders, which can be t...

A Touching Speech

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:18:17 +0000

Some orators are congratulated on delivering a touching oratory, but new research suggests that we genuinely do feel moved by speech - and use the sensation to work out what people are say...

New gene-screen "knocks-out" pathogen targets

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:12:31 +0000

Scientists have discovered a quick way to flush out how pathogens like bacteria and viruses target our cells. The system could show researchers where to target their efforts in developing the ne...

Folding solar cells

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:50:53 +0000

The most expensive part of conventional solar cells is rapidly becoming the raw silicon wafers which they are made from. One obvious way of reducing the amount of silicon a cell needs is to make...

Osmotic power plant

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:45:03 +0000

Osmosis is a process that is vital to the whole of life. It is based on a partially permeable membrane which will allow water through but not allow salts or other dissolved substances. If ...

Plants hide too!

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:19:51 +0000

The animal kingdom is full of species that do their best to hide from predators by adopting all sorts of clever camouflage to help them blend with their surroundings and not get spotted. And now it se...

Why the strange head?

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:15:08 +0000

The peculiar shape of hammerhead sharks is a biological conundrum that has long puzzled scientists.Now American scientists have uncovered some of the secrets of these odd hammer-shaped heads, showing...

Deleting old memories to make room for new ones...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:53:07 +0000

I'm sure most of you out there will have run out of disk space on a computer and had to overwrite a few files. And it looks like the short-term memory of animals isn't all that far-removed.Publishing...

Smell Test for Old Books

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:50:54 +0000

There's the old saying, 'never judge a book by its cover' and indeed you shouldn't - now chemists are saying you should judge them by their smell, instead. Publishing in the Journal Analytical Chemist...

Greenland melting fast

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:02:20 +0000

Combining measurements from space with ground-based observations and scientific models, scientists have found that the Greenland icesheet is melting at an alarming rate. Between 2006 and 2008, two hun...

Dinosaurs not cold-blooded killers after all

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:56:04 +0000

Scientists have uncovered new evidence that dinosaurs might well have been warm blooded. A paper in PLoS one this week by Washington University scientist Herman Pontzer and two scientists from the UK'...

Lithium shows scientists where to find far-off planets

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:43:06 +0000

A European team of scientists may have discovered a shortcut to finding distant planets orbiting far-off stars - you look for lithium, or rather a lack of it. Lithium is the third lightest element in...