Science

A simple smell test may one day be able to help identify people at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease up to 10 years before the disease could be diagnosed, a new study claims. Poor olfaction predicts Parkinson’s disease in short and intermediate terms, according to Chen et al. Image …

  NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe is currently on its way to an asteroid to do some very cool science, but it has to make a quick stop by Earth first. As the probe executes a flyby of its home planet in the next few weeks, astronomers around the world will be …

In a research article published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Professor Koh Woon Puay of the Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, and colleagues report that greater consumption of red meat and poultry was associated with a significantly increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes — partially attributed to higher content …

A new architecture, based on so-called ‘flip-flop’ qubits, allows for a silicon quantum processor that can be scaled up without the precise placement of atoms required in other approaches. Importantly, it allows qubits to be placed hundreds of nanometers (nm) apart and still remain coupled. Schematic view of a large-scale …

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features, has officially approved the naming of 14 features on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto. Pluto’s first official surface-feature names are marked on this map, compiled from images and data gathered by …

An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Barry Paw of the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, has identified a genetic mutation that may be responsible for ‘vampire’ folklore. The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Different genetic variations that affect …

  The US Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane is set to go off on another secret mission in space, but its trip into space will come courtesy of a new partner: SpaceX. The launch is currently scheduled for September 7th at Cape Canaveral, just days ahead of the potential …

The 70-million-year-old fossilized remains of three juvenile oviraptorids from the Nemegt Formation of Southern Mongolia are the first evidence of ‘communal roosting’ in dinosaurs, according to University of Alberta paleontologist Gregory Funston and colleagues. Photo and sketch of the confiscated specimen showing three different juveniles of the same species of …

In a research paper published this week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, scientists report that Zika virus could be used to target and kill brain cancer stem cells, the kind of cells most resistant to standard treatments. Space-fill drawing of the outside of one Zika virus particle, and a …

Genetic variants linked to Alzheimer’s disease and heavy smoking are less frequent in people with longer lifespans, suggesting that natural selection is weeding out these unfavorable variants in some populations, according to an analysis of the genomes of 210,000 people in the U.S. and UK. Mostafavi et al found a …