BOSTON — You’ve heard the advice: For clean hands, scrub with soap and water for as long as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice. But is hand sanitizer just squirt and go? Finally, there’s a scientific answer: To kill bacteria, rub for at least 15 to 30 seconds. After 45 seconds, you’re not doing […]

Scientists have found a clue to why one type of DNA is passed down to children by their mothers — but not their fathers. DNA inside energy-producing organelles called mitochondria is destroyed in a dad’s sperm shortly after it fertilizes an egg, researchers report online June 23 in Science. A protein called CPS-6 cuts apart […]

Gun debate cross fireIn “Misfires in the gun control debate” (SN: 5/14/16, p. 16), Meghan Rosen reported on the roadblocks researchers face in collecting informative data on gun violence in the United States. Readers responded passionately, expressing many different viewpoints about the story and the controversial topic of gun control. “I thought Ms. Rosen’s article […]

Jupiter has a new visitor. After traveling 2.8 billion kilometers across space, NASA’s Juno probe — a mission to investigate Jupiter’s deep interior (SN: 6/25/16, p. 16) — arrived at the giant planet July 4. Juno’s scientific instruments were switched off on June 29 before the probe slid into its first of 37 orbits, so […]

Microscope work may have solved the puzzle of Asian snails’ “useless” snorkels. The small Alycaeidae land snails of Asia grow what looks like a tiny breathing tube curling partway along the outside of their shells. Similar tubes let some other land snails breathe when a little blast-door operculum shuts the main opening of their shells. […]

To understand human longevity, look to the animal world, says James Carey, a biodemography specialist at the University of California, Davis. Studying other species, from insects to elephants, “provides important information for why we age and why we live as long as we do,” Carey says. By looking at how long other organisms can live, […]

Dark matter has once again given scientists the slip. Physicists with the Large Underground Xenon experiment, or LUX, report that their final set of data, collected from October 2014 to May 2016, contains no evidence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up more than 25 percent of the universe. The LUX detector, located […]

In the arms race of life, a number of animals use venom as a weapon to paralyze prey and jump-start digestion. Meanwhile, venom also helps a variety of other seemingly defenseless creatures improve their odds against larger, stronger or more aggressive foes. In Venomous, molecular biologist Christie Wilcox surveys the animal kingdom’s wide array of […]

The whipsaw of recent Zika news — good, then grim, then good again — paints a dizzying picture of the epidemic’s reach, risks and how to fight it. On July 25, Colombia announced that the Zika epidemic there was over — good news for a country with nearly 100,000 cases of infection reported so far. […]

Here’s something new for real estate agents to boast about in posh neighborhoods: houses with a bigger variety of insects and spiders. Maybe that’s not the best selling point. But what’s called a “luxury effect” appeared among more than 10,000 arthropod samples collected from the insides of 50 houses in urban and suburban Raleigh, N.C. […]