It doesn't matter if it's wine or beer, the increased breast cancer risk from drinking three or more alcoholic drinks a day is similar to the increased breast cancer risk from smoking a packet of cigarettes or more a day.

Dr Arthur Klatsky said: “Population studies have consistently linked drinking alcohol to an increased risk of female breast cancer, but there has been little data, most of it conflicting, about an independent role played by the choice of beverage type.”

Dr Klatsky, adjunct investigator in the Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, Oakland, USA, and his colleagues studied the drinking habits of 70,033 multi-ethnic women who had supplied information during health examinations between 1978-1985.

A new study finds that young girls and women are more likely to believe that negative past events predict future events, compared to boys and men. And that, according to researchers, may help explain why females have more frequent and intense worries, perceive more risk, have greater intolerance for uncertainty, and experience higher rates of anxiety than males.

In two studies involving 128 people, a researcher investigated 3- to 6-year-olds’ as well as adults’ knowledge that worry and preventative behaviors can be caused by thinking that a negative event from the past will or might reoccur in the future.

Immigration, official language policies, and changing cultural norms mean that many infants are being raised bilingually. Because nearly all experimental work in infant language development has focused on children who are monolingual, relatively little is known about the learning processes involved in acquiring two languages from birth.

A new study showed infants who are raised in bilingual homes learned two similar-sounding words in a laboratory task at a later age than babies who are raised in homes where only one language is spoken.

In its ability to learn, the cockroach is a moron in the morning and a genius in the evening.

Dramatic daily variations in the cockroach’s learning ability were discovered by a new study performed by Vanderbilt University biologists and published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This is the first example of an insect whose ability to learn is controlled by its biological clock,” says Terry L. Page, the professor of biological sciences who directed the project. Undergraduate students Susan Decker and Shannon McConnaughey also participated in the study.

Chips from 10 million years ago have revealed new insights into fish diets and their influence on fish evolution, according to new research. The chips were found, along with scratches, on the teeth of fossil stickleback fish and reveal for the first time how changes in the way an animal feeds control its evolution over thousands of years.

This kind of study, which was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, has previously not been possible because although fossils preserve direct evidence of evolutionary change over thousands and millions of years, working out exactly what a long-dead fossil animal was eating when it was alive, and establishing a link between feeding and evolution, is very difficult.

Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as the driver of the meltdown, says a new study.

“There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, published in Science. “You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.”

Stott is an expert in paleoclimatology and was a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ). He also recently co-authored a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tracing a 900-year history of monsoon variability in India.