More Stories from the February 5, 2000 issue
- Humans
Treaty Nears on Gene-Altered Exports
In an effort to help preserve biodiversity, negotiators from 130 nations crafted rules of conduct for international trade in living, genetically engineered organisms.
- Anthropology
Drowned land holds clue to first Americans
A map of a now-flooded region charts the path that Asians may have taken to first reach the Americas.
- Physics
Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms
Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.
- Health & Medicine
Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset
Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.
- Earth
DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers
Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.
- Animals
Bees log flight distances, train with maps
After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.
- Astronomy
Milky Way gets a new layer
Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.
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Keys to expertise in the brain
A brain region linked to face recognition may foster expertise at identifying items in any category a person strives to master.
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Dendrite decline in schizophrenia
Cell connections in a part of the brain's frontal lobe appear to dwindle in people with schizophrenia.
- Plants
Why tulips can’t dance
An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.
- Ecosystems
Males live longer with all-year mating
Male butterflies live longer in Madeira, where females are available year-round, than in Sweden, where females mature in one burst.
- Earth
Just how much do U.S. roads matter?
A Harvard researcher calculates that roads directly influence the ecology of a fifth of U.S. land area.
- Health & Medicine
Lung cancer gene has gender bias
The X chromosome's gastrin-releasing peptide receptor gene is turned on by nicotine to produce a protein that promotes lung cancer, a combination of factors that could explain why women are more susceptible to the disease than men are.
- Health & Medicine
No worry that this secret will leak
The recently discovered protein angiopoietin-1 appears to protect blood vessels from leaking, a finding with implications for research into diseases that involve swelling, such as arthritis and asthma.
- Materials Science
Vision Quest
Increasing numbers of people with less-than-perfect vision can now wear contact lenses, thanks to innovations in lens design and materials.
- Animals
When Ants Squeak
In the past 20 years, researchers studying sound communication in ants have discovered a sort of ant-ernet, zinging with messages about lost relatives, great food, free rides for hitchhikers, caterpillars in search of ant partners, and impending doom.
