Category: Research

What do you do when you?ve had a bad day? Depending on the depths of the badness, the cash and time at your disposal, and your post-trauma ability to make complete sentences, you can curl up with a book, hit the gym or the fridge, shop, watch YouTube, or call your mom.

Scientists have long worried that an influenza virus that has ravaged poultry and wild birds in Asia might evolve to pose a threat to humans. Now scientists financed by the National Institutes of Health have shown in a laboratory how that could happen. In the process they created a virus that could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people if it escaped confinement or was stolen by terrorists.

Recent reports that two teams of scientists had genetically altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious have provoked fear, even outrage, in some quarters.

Bird flu kills more than half the people who catch it. The saving grace of H5N1 is that it?s not easily spread among humans. Almost all of the 600 people who have been infected by the virus in its 14-year history have picked it up from infected poultry.

Attempts to censor details of controversial influenza experiments that created a highly infectious form of bird-flu virus are unlikely to stop the information from leaking out, according to scientists familiar with the research.

America has no Galileos. Here, we proudly defend the freedom of scientists to go wherever the evidence takes them.

LOS ANGELES — In a top-security lab in the Netherlands, scientists guard specimens of a super-killer influenza that slays half of those it infects and spreads easily from victim to victim.

The specter of censorship loomed over science last week with news that a federal advisory panel had asked two leading journals to withhold details of experiments out of fear that terrorists could use the information to make deadly flu viruses ? the first time the government had interceded this way in biomedical research.

In his research, Jack Williams, director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, studies the impact climate change had at the end of the last ice age–around 15,000 years ago–when global temperatures rose by 9°F.

By analyzing ancient materials trapped in lake beds, he and his colleagues in the field have come to some startling conclusions. For one, small fluctuations in global temperature can cause large-scale biological changes across the planet, including mass migrations and extinctions.

As climate change continues to tick the Earths temperature upward, we can learn what to expect of a hotter planet by looking at the past. In his research, Jack Williams, director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, studies the impact climate change had at the end of the last ice age–around 15,000 years ago–when global temperatures rose by 9°F. By analyzing ancient materials trapped in lake beds, he and his colleagues in the field have come to some startling conclusions. For one, small fluctuations in global temperature can cause large-scale biological changes across the planet, including mass migrations and extinctions. 

Scientists seeking to fight future pandemics have created a variety of ?bird flu? potentially so dangerous that a federal advisory panel has for the first time asked two science journals to hold back on publishing details of research.

Scientists agreed not to publish certain details of research showing how lethal bird flu can be made contagious after a U.S. biosecurity panel asked that it be kept secret for security reasons.

Two top scientific journals say they are deciding whether to publish details of a man-made mutant flu virus that could kill billions, after a US government?s science advisory committee advised them to withhold key details.

It is a nightmare scenario: a human pandemic caused by the accidental release of a man-made form of the lethal avian influenza virus H5N1.

A committee that advises the government says that details of two controversial experiments on bird flu virus should not be made public, because of fears that the work could provide a recipe for a bioweapon.

A U.S. scientific advisory board has asked two scientific journals ? Nature and Science ? to publish redacted versions of two controversial studies on bird flu virus because of fears of bioterrorism.

US authorities have asked the authors of two controversial bird flu studies to redact key details after a government advisory panel suggested the data could be used by terrorists.

The U.S. government paid scientists to figure out how the deadly bird flu virus might mutate to become a bigger threat to people ? and two labs succeeded in creating new strains that are easier to spread.

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

Starting with the virus that causes bird flu, two scientists have created a highly contagious version in the laboratory that one calls “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”

A University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist who is an expert on the avian flu virus is under scrutiny because of concerns his new research may fall into the wrong hands.

The scientist is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, an eminent professor of virology in the School of Veterinary Medicine who has done research on H5N1, also known as the avian bird flu. His work and similar research independently done by a Dutch scientist have raised concerns in science journals and on an NBC News report that aired Thursday night that touched on such controversial issues as bioterrorism and scientific freedom.

In September, an amiable Dutchman stepped up to the podium at a scientific meeting convened on the island of Malta and announced that he had created a form of influenza that could well be the deadliest contagious disease humanity has ever faced. The bombshell announcement, by virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center, sparked weeks of vigorous debate among the world?s experts on bioterrorism, influenza, virology, and national security over whether the research should have been performed or announced and whether it should ever be published.

Back in 2005, then-Harvard president Lawrence Summers proclaimed that boys were simply better at math because, well, because they were boys. It was a statement once-removed from sending the little ladies back into the kitchen with aprons tied around their waists and frankly, the backlash that quickly followed and pulverized Summers was well-deserved.

Many believe that fossils represent organisms that died millions of years ago. Scientific literature, however, contains dozens of well-described original soft tissues in fossils. Since laboratory tests have shown that organic tissues decay in only thousands of years, these fossils have been at the center of much heated controversy.

Many explanations for the gender gap in math skills don?t hold up, suggests new research on math skills and gender in 86 countries.

Scientists have previously believed that the relatively low numbers of women in high-level mathematics could be due to biological differences between men and women. But a new, international study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has cast doubt on the idea that the differences are biological at all.

Discover’s Carl Zimmer on cutting-edge flu research and the way it’s portrayed by news media.