Testosterone may tamp down asthma caused by inhaling pollen, dust or other airborne allergens. That’s partly why more women suffer from the lung disease than men, new research suggests. The male sex hormone acts on a group of immune cells that are part of the first line of the body’s defense against invaders. These cells […]

There’s stiff competition for the most elaborate eyeballs in the animal kingdom, but a mollusk that turns up on dinner plates might be a finalist. Each of a scallop’s eyes — it has up to 200 of them, each about a millimeter in diameter — contains millions of perfectly square, flat crystals that build up […]

A new type of 3-D printing ink has a special ingredient: live bacteria. Materials made with this “living ink” could help clean up environmental pollution, harvest energy via photosynthesis or help make medical supplies, researchers report online December 1 in Science Advances. This study “shows for the first time that 3-D printed bacteria can make […]

OXON HILL, Md. — Even as technological advances allow astronomers to peer more deeply into the cosmos than ever before, new technologies also have the potential to create blinding pollution. Three sources of pollution — space debris, radio interference and light pollution — already are particularly worrisome. And the situation is getting worse. In the […]

Nerve cells in the brain make elaborate connections and exchange lightning-quick messages that captivate scientists. But these cells also sport simpler, hairlike protrusions called cilia. Long overlooked, the little stubs may actually have big jobs in the brain. Researchers are turning up roles for nerve cell cilia in a variety of brain functions. In a […]

Toad versus bombardier beetle is almost a fair fight. Toads are hugely bigger, can tongue-strike in an eyeblink and swallow all kinds of nasty stuff. But bombardier beetles can shoot hot steam and noxious chemicals from their back ends. In a lab face-off, 43 percent of Pheropsophus jessoensis bombardiers escaped alive after being swallowed by […]

There’s a planet just next door that could explain the origins of life in the universe. It was probably once covered in oceans (SN Online: 8/1/17). It may have been habitable for billions of years (SN Online: 8/26/16). Astronomers are desperate to land spacecraft there. No, not Mars. That tantalizing planet is Venus. But despite […]

It’s a wonder we have chocolate at all. Talk about persnickety, difficult flowers. Arguably some of the most important seeds on the planet — they give us candy bars and hot cocoa, after all — come from pods created by dime-sized flowers on cacao trees. Yet those flowers make pollination just barely possible. Growers of […]