More Stories from the August 10, 2013 issue
- Health & Medicine
Paralyzed rats relearn to pee
Bladder control restored for the first time in animals with stark spinal cord damage.
- Animals
Honeybees use right antennae to tell friend from foe
Asymmetry in sense of smell alters insects' behavior in lab tests.
- Animals
Gut microbes may put barrier between species
Wiping out gut bacteria in wasps saves crossbred offspring from death, suggesting that microbes may play a role in speciation.
- Animals
Highlights from the Evolution 2013 meeting
Selections from the meeting include a natural fish experiment, terrapins' light displays and why a variety of eye colors persist in people, presented June 21-25 in Snowbird, Utah.
- Space
Interstellar chemistry makes use of quantum shortcut
Reactions in the frigid cold of space are sped by a quirk of physics, researchers propose.
- Life
Bacterial molecules may prevent inflammatory bowel disease
Common compounds produced by gut microbes quench colitis in mice.
- Planetary Science
Gas, not planets, may be source of rings around stars
Interactions between gas and dust may form elliptical patterns.
- Physics
Perfect mirror debuts
Material that reflects light without letting any escape could improve lasers.
- Health & Medicine
Four-question test ID’s women with depression
Simple decision tool shows potential as quick way to identify clinical depression.
- Health & Medicine
What and when babies first eat may affect diabetes risk
Children at risk of type 1 diabetes are better off waiting until 4 months of age to consume solid foods.
- Chemistry
Coatings have simple recipe for success
Chemists encapsulate tiny objects using natural ingredients and easy, inexpensive process.
- Life
Gene therapy treats children with rare diseases
Six kids are healthy, up to three years after treatment.
- Earth
Huge quakes may foretell smaller, human-caused ones
Distant powerful temblors triggered ominous activity at wastewater injection sites.
- Animals
Fattened livers prep white sharks for extreme migrations
The organ's reserves enable a long journey from waters off California to Hawaii and back, tracking data suggest.
- Genetics
Technique inactivates Down-causing chromosome
Though far from a cure, the advance could eventually lead to gene therapy that alleviates some symptoms.
- Tech
Surgical tool smokes out cancer in seconds
Sniffing for telltale molecules, method analyzes tissue with every cut.
- Anthropology
War arose recently, anthropologists contend
Infrequent killings among hunter-gatherer groups fit a scenario of a largely peaceful Stone Age, a study concludes.
- Physics
Under magnet’s sway, fluids form simple structures
Droplets wiggle, split and coalesce into simple and dynamic configurations.
- Life
Size isn’t only mystery of huge virus
A strange replication method and an unusual genetic sequence are among the mysteries of the outsized Pandoravirus.
- Environment
Atomic ant sand
Robb Hermes asked for sand ants to get samples of Trinitite, a material created in the test blasts of the first atomic bomb.
- Neuroscience
Brainwashed
The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld.
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Letters to the editor
Not-so-smart perception Researchers studying associations between IQ and selected visual tasks (“Less is more for smart perception,” SN: 6/29/13, p. 18) report that tracking small moving foreground objects, a task at which high-IQ subjects excelled, is often more important than detecting large-object motion or attending to background activity. They suggest that for driving or walking […]
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