More Stories from the May 3, 2003 issue
- Health & Medicine
Protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease
Inhibiting the natural protein cyclo-oxygenase-2, or COX-2, might help fight Parkinson's disease.
- Earth
Seismic waves resolve continental debate
New analyses of seismic waves that have traveled deep within Earth may answer a decades-old question about the thickness of the planet's continents.
- Planetary Science
Roving on the Red Planet
NASA last month selected the landing sites for rovers scheduled to begin exploring the Martian surface next January.
- Tech
Tipping tiny scales
A prototype detector based on a tiny silicon cantilever that operates in air has achieved a 1,000-fold sensitivity boost when measuring tiny quantities of chemical agents.
- Earth
Harbor waves yield secrets to analysis
New findings by ocean scientists may help port officials in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, predict potentially destructive waves in the city's harbor.
- Physics
Not even bismuth-209 lasts forever
Touted in textbooks as the heaviest stable, naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209 actually does decay but with an astonishingly long half-life of 19 billion billion years.
-
Egg’s missing proteins thwart primate cloning
Scientists have identified a reason why cloning a person may be difficult, if not impossible.
- Anthropology
Ancestral Bushwhack: Hominid tree gets trimmed twice
In separate presentations at scientific meetings, two anthropologists challenged the influential view that the human evolutionary family has contained as many as 20 different fossil species.
- Physics
Crystal Bash: Shocking changes to light’s properties
Prized, light-manipulating microstructures known as photonic crystals may transform light in new and technologically tantalizing ways when jolted by shock waves.
- Earth
Sensing a vibe
A sprawling network of seismometers that covers the Los Angeles area could be adapted to provide warning of damaging ground motions from earthquakes in the seconds before those seismic vibes arrive.
-
Paddle Power: Surprising shape of key cellular pore unveiled
A molecular pore that controls the flow of ions into cells has an unexpected shape and mechanism.
- Chemistry
Nanoscale Networks: Superlong nanotubes can form a grid
Researchers have made extraordinarily long carbon nanotubes and aligned them to create tiny transistors and sensors for detecting chemical and biological agents.
- Astronomy
Chemistry of the Cosmos: Quasars illuminate the young universe
Measuring the composition of some of the earliest structures in the universe, two teams of astronomers have unveiled new findings about star formation in the young cosmos.
- Health & Medicine
Upsetting a Delicate Balance: One gene may underlie various immune diseases
One form of an immune-system gene shows up more frequently in people with diabetes or certain thyroid diseases than in people free of those illnesses.
- Animals
Ballistic defecation: Hiding, not hygiene
Evading predators may be the big factor driving certain caterpillars to shoot their waste pellets great distances.
- Computing
Minding Your Business
By means of novel sensors and mathematical models, scientists are teaching the basics of human social interactions to computers, which should ease the ever-expanding collaboration between people and machines.
- Plants
Any Hope for Old Chestnuts?
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of chestnut blight in the United States, but enthusiasts still haven't given up hope of restoring American chestnut forests.
