More Stories from the February 12, 2000 issue
- Health & Medicine
Researchers Probe Cell-Phone Effects
Scientists are trying to find out whether biological changes associated with cell-phone use represent health risks.
-
Drugs order bacteria to commit suicide
Seeking to explain how antibiotics work, scientists find a protein that commands bacteria to kill themselves.
- Astronomy
Solar magnetism: Memories are made of this
Despite all its upheavals, the sun's magnetic field has a built-in memory, allowing it to return to its original position and configuration.
- Humans
R&D budget should ease biomed envy
President Clinton's science budget for 2001 proposes to narrow a gap that's yawned in recent years between lusher funding for biomedicine and leaner support for the physical sciences.
-
Sleepyheads’ brains veer from restful path
Unusual patterns of brain activity appear in sleep-deprived volunteers trying to solve verbal and mathematical problems.
- Chemistry
Stopping batteries from starting fires
A new flame-retardant substance could make rechargeable lithium-ion batteries practical for powering electric vehicles.
- Animals
Flight puts the fight back into crickets
Researchers are just discovering what gamblers in China have known for centuries—flying can make a losing cricket fight again.
- Physics
Ultracold molecules form inside superatom
The formation of molecules within an ultracold gas of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate could be a step toward fluids in which molecules share the same quantum state.
- Health & Medicine
AIDS drugs may cause bone loss
Using X rays to measure bone density in HIV-infected men, researchers find a possible link between bone loss and long-term use of protease inhibitors.
- Health & Medicine
HIV may date back to the 1930s
Genetic analysis of the AIDS virus suggests it first infected humans in the first third of the 20th century.
- Health & Medicine
One more reason to worry
A single dose of the AIDS drug nevirapine, given to mothers to help prevent them from infecting their children during birth, may be enough to prod the virus to develop drug resistance.
- Physics
Spectral atom rings in
Electron waves can generate a phantom atom when a real atom is placed at the right spot inside an elliptical quantum corral, or loop of atoms, arranged on a surface.
- Astronomy
Revved-Up Universe
Astronomers are busy testing the seemingly bizarre notion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
-
Keeping Bugs from Pumping Drugs
Researchers hope that attacking the machinery some microbes use to pump antimicrobial agents out of their cells may help deal with the increasing problem of drug resistance.
