Using visible and infrared data collected from telescopes on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, astronomers have identified three asteroids that appear to be among our solar system's oldest objects.

  Impaired sense of smell occurs in the earliest stages of Parkinson's disease and there is mounting evidence that it may precede motor symptoms by several years.

  A method of creating selective terminable transgenic rice has been developed. Unintended spreading of transgenic rice by pollen and seed dispersal is a major concern for planting transgenic rice, especially transgenic rice expressing pharmaceutical or industrial proteins.

  One of the more intriguing workhorses of the cell, a protein conglomerate called telomerase, has in its short history been implicated in some critical areas of medicine including cancer, aging and keeping stem cells healthy.

  A new project will test how people respond to extreme social situations - particularly the 'bystander effect' - using an immersive virtual environment like Second Life where real people interact with each other socially through lifelike animated characters. The bystander effect suggests that the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely an individual bystander is to intervene. This phenomenon was identified as a particular consequence of the assault and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964 which was witnessed by some 38 people, all of whom remained bystanders and failed to come to Kitty's aid.

  When it comes to what we eat, men and women really are different according to scientific research. In general, men are more likely to report eating meat and poultry items and women are more likely to report eating fruits and vegetables.

  Researchers have used nanotechnology to achieve a major increase in thermoelectric efficiency, a milestone that paves the way for a new generation of products -- from semiconductors and air conditioners to car exhaust systems and solar power technology -- that run cleaner. The team's low-cost approach, detailed in Science, involves building tiny alloy nanostructures that can serve as micro-coolers and power generators.

  Scientists have found that people with a form of inherited motor neuron disease have abnormalities in the same gene that appears to be affected in people who suffer nerve damage after exposure to harmful amounts of organophosphates. The results raise the possibility that healthy people may have gene variants that make them vulnerable to nerve damage if exposed to the chemicals, which include common insecticides and have been linked to Gulf War illness.

  For statues, stress injuries come from standing in place for hundreds of years. Using a novel technique, researchers have now developed a way to predict such fracturing, applying the procedure to Michelangelo's David in an analysis that proved simpler, faster and more accurate than previous methods. In applying the technique to other objects -- including human bones -- the researchers are also gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail.

  Researchers report that full-body PET/CT scanning detected unsuspected, treatable tumors in 3 of 15 patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a rare genetic cancer syndrome for which no screening tests have been recommended. They caution, however, that further, larger studies are needed to determine whether PET/CT screening is beneficial in LFS patients, who are highly susceptible to a variety of cancers from an early age because of an inborn gene mutation.

  Students have produced a fairly simple mechanical device that people in developing countries can use to process anything from corn to barley. If it's successful, the grain crusher can help producefood for residents of Third World countries and enable some people to generate an income as they travel from community to community crushing foodstuff for a price.

  Despite public health campaigns, a surprising number of women continue to use substances such as tobacco, marijuana and alcohol during pregnancy and their usage rebounds to pre-pregnancy levels within two years of having a baby. Dads, meanwhile, don't get the messages at all.

  By injecting a customized "genetic patch" into early stage fish embryos, researchers were able to correct a genetic mutation so the embryos developed normally. The research could lead to the prevention of up to one-fifth of birth defects in humans caused by genetic mutations, according to the scientists involved in the study.

  A new study appears to explain how humans, along with other higher primates, guinea pigs and fruit bats, get by with what some have called an "inborn metabolic error": an inability to produce vitamin C from glucose.