Science News

Ellen Heber-Katz, a scientist at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, used to study autoimmunity--that was until she noticed something strange in the mice she was using to model lupus: The small holes that she had poked in their ears to distinguish the animals from one another kept closing. At first she thought her postdoc, Lise Clark, had forgotten to make the holes in the first place. But Clark clearly remembered doing it. Together, Heber-Katz and Clark pierced new holes. Within days, they closed, too. “Every day they got smaller and smaller and then just disappeared,” Heber-Katz says. And, there was no scar--the tissue was perfect. They wondered: “If we could find out what it was that was creating this response, we could treat wounds that way!”

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Former heads of Sprint Nextel Corp and RadioShack Corp have launched a company aimed at refurbishing or recycling the estimated 65,000 metric tons of old cellphones U.S. consumers ditch every year and named Sprint as its first customer.

Ron LeMay, once Chief Executive for Sprint's wireless business and David Edmonson, former CEO of electronics retailer RadioShack founded eRecyclingCorps to set up phone trade-in schemes for operators to encourage consumers to return old phones to carriers instead of putting them in the trash.

When Pangaea finally broke up , some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface , ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn't just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth's five major extinction events--and the one that paved the way for the dinosaurs. [More]

Ever get a sour stomach after your morning coffee? Well, you might end up switching to a dark roast--because that coffee concoction may leave you with a happier tummy. That's according to research presented at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco. [And to be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry , http://bit.ly/cberXM ]

Some coffees are labeled "stomach friendly," because they're steam treated to drive out caffeine and other chemicals thought to cause gastrointestinal distress. But food chemists [Veronika Somoza et al.] wanted to know exactly which chemicals were behind the heartburn. So they took extracts of two coffee blends--one light, one dark--and their steam-treated counterparts. Each extract proved to be a unique chemical mix, with different amounts of caffeine and other compounds.

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