Science news not yet dumbed down by reporters, but not yet confirmed as reflecting reality.
From http://eurekalert.org:
Public Release: 3-Feb-2009
Cancer
One-fifth of women who should receive radiation after a mastectomy are not getting this potentially lifesaving treatment, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
NIH/National Cancer Institute
http://www2.med.umich.edu/...
Public Release: 3-Feb-2009
Geology
February 2009 Geology and GSA Today media highlights
GEOLOGY includes three papers about Mars: continuation of the "jelly sandwich" versus "crème brûlée" debate; support for the Snowball Earth hypothesis; what nine-million-year-old tooth enamel says about vegetation in an ancient sub-Himalayan ecosystem; anthropogenic lead in the Tyrrhenian Sea; evidence for a prehistoric South Pacific tsunami; a multicentennial megadrought in medieval Europe; and a newly discovered fossil turtle in the Canadian Arctic. GSA Today's science article proposes a new method for classifying Quaternary glacial deposits.
http://www.geosociety.org/...
Public Release: 3-Feb-2009
Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist. Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic universe.
http://www.eurekalert.org/...
Public Release: 3-Feb-2009
American Naturalist
Why don't more animals change their sex?
Most animals, like humans, have separate sexes -- they are born, live out their lives and reproduce as one sex or the other. However, some animals live as one sex in part of their lifetime and then switch to the other sex, a phenomenon called sequential hermaphroditism. What remains a puzzle, according to Yale scientists, is why the phenomenon is so rare, since their analysis shows the biological "costs" of changing sexes rarely outweigh the advantages.
Yale University, National Science Foundation
http://www.eurekalert.org/...
Public Release: 3-Feb-2009
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Living longer thanks to the 'longevity gene'
A variation in the gene FOXO3A has a positive effect on the life expectancy of humans, and is found much more often in people living to 100 and beyond -- moreover, this appears to be true worldwide. A research group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel has now confirmed this assumption by comparing DNA samples taken from 388 German centenarians with those from 731 younger people.
National Genome Research Network
http://www.uni-kiel.de/...