More Stories from the June 16, 2001 issue
- Earth
Global Warming Debate Gets Hotter
President Bush gets the global warming report he commissioned just days before he meets with European leaders.
- Earth
New test traces underground forest carbon
An unusual method of studying soil respiration by girdling trees may clear up several vital mysteries in the way carbon cycles through forests.
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Healthy aging may depend on past habits
A 60-year study indicates that middle-aged men can exert a considerable amount of personal control over their eventual physical and mental health as seniors.
- Materials Science
Scientists get a handle on crystal shape
Researchers have discovered how the orientation of amino acid molecules can make a growing crystal take on either a right- or a left-handed form.
- Earth
Memory problems linked to PCBs in fish
Adult exposures to polychlorinated biphenyls, from eating tainted fish, correlate with lower scores on learning and memorization tasks.
- Health & Medicine
Soy estrogens: Too much of a good thing?
Two studies of female mice suggest that genistein, an estrogen analog found in soy, could contribute to cancer risk.
- Planetary Science
Nearby star may have its own asteroid belt
Observations of warm dust swaddling a young, nearby star suggest that astronomers may have found evidence of a massive asteroid belt outside the solar system.
- Anthropology
Early agriculture flowered in Mexico
Mexico may have served as a center of early plant domestication in the Americas, according to researchers who have excavated a site near Mexico's Gulf Coast.
- Anthropology
Human fossils tell a fish tale
Fossil clues indicate that Stone Age humans ate a considerable amount of seafood, giving them a broader and more resilient diet than that of Neandertals.
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Minke whales make Star Wars noises
Researchers have identified the dwarf minke whales of Australia as the source of an odd sound like the firing of a Stars Wars laser gun.
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Sitting around? (Chomp!) Back to work!
An analysis of nestmates biting each other in a wasp colony suggests that the nips and outright chomps help organize work flow in the nest.
- Earth
Large earthquake would ravage Oregon
A magnitude 8.5 earthquake off the coast of Oregon would devastate portions of the state, kill thousands of residents, and wrack the economy there for more than a decade.
- Earth
Seismic simulations help track tanks
New computer models developed to analyze how seismic vibrations travel through uneven terrain can also be used to identify and track heavy vehicles such as tanks and trains.
- Earth
Midlatitude bogs store carbon best
Sediments in lakes and bogs along the eastern coast of the United States show that midlatitude bodies of water have sequestered higher amounts of carbon than others since the last ice age.
- Earth
More acid rain in East Asia’s future
Large increases in Asian industrial emissions of nitrogen oxides in the next 30 years could lead to a tripling of the acid rain there due to those pollutants.
- Earth
Alaska’s coastal permafrost is eroding
Aerial photographs taken over the past 50 years show that Alaska's coastlines of permafrost aren't that permanent after all.
- Physics
New probe zooms in on midgets of magnetism
A new microscope for peering at magnetic materials provides the first glimpses of how such materials behave on a scale of only tens of atoms.
- Math
Surprisingly Square
Mathematicians take a fresh look at expressing numbers as the sums of squares.
- Health & Medicine
Coming to Terms with Death
Some newly recognized forms of cell death might be harnessed to aid people with cancer and other serious diseases.
