164 articles from TUESDAY 17.9.2019

One in 16 American women forced into first sexual encounter: study

One in 16 American women were either forced or coerced into their first sexual encounter, according to a study investigating the long-term negative impacts of such "trauma" on women's health. In the US, "the #MeToo movement has highlighted how frequently women experience sexual violence," the researchers wrote in the introduction. Published Monday in the American Medical Association's...

Black carbon from air pollution found in placentas: study

Black carbon particles typically emitted by vehicle exhaust and coal-fired power plants have been detected on the foetus-facing side of placentas, researchers said Tuesday. The concentration of particles was highest in the placentas of women most exposed to airborn pollutants in their daily life, according to a study in Nature Communications. "Our study provides compelling evidence for the...

Plantwatch: England's carnivorous sundew makes a comeback

Sticky-tentacled species returns to boglands but introducing meat-eating varieties is not without riskThe great sundew (Drosera anglica) is a carnivorous plant with leaves covered in red tentacles that ooze sticky slime to kill and digest insects, giving the plant extra nutrition in the boglands where it grows.It was once common in England but was almost wiped out as wetlands and peat bogs were...

Handheld device to diagnose skin cancer

Using shortwave rays installed in cellphones and airport security scanners, researchers have developed a technique that detects skin lesions and determines whether they are cancerous or benign -- a technology that could ultimately be incorporated into a handheld device that could rapidly diagnose skin cancer without a scalpel in sight.

Rare 10 million-year-old fossil unearths new view of human evolution

Near an old mining town in Central Europe, known for its picturesque turquoise-blue quarry water, lay Rudapithecus. For 10 million years, the fossilized ape waited in Rudabánya, Hungary, to add its story to the origins of how humans evolved. What Rudabánya yielded was a pelvis -- among the most informative bones of a skeleton, but one that is rarely preserved.

Perhaps we need to explain climate change to politicians as we would to very small children | Emma White

Here, let me try. The sun is very, very hotWhen I was an undergrad learning geology, the maxim that was thumped into me wasn’t how to build a mine or drill for oil and gas, it was simply: “The present is the key to the past.” The thing that took a while to accept was that the past was really, really, long.It’s hard to comprehend the scale of geologic time: the timespan for continents to...

New piece of Alzheimer's puzzle found

Scientists found two short peptides, or strings of amino acids, that when injected into mice with Alzheimer's disease daily for five weeks, significantly improved the mice's memory. The treatment also reduced some of the harmful physical changes in the brain that are associated with the disease.

Space Talent puts jobs at Blue Origin, SpaceX and elsewhere in one big database

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture and Elon Musk's SpaceX are often at odds, but there's at least one place where those two space-industry rivals are on the same page: the newly unveiled Space Talent job database. The search engine for careers in the space industry is a project of Space Angels, a nationwide network designed to link angel investors with space entrepreneurs. "If...