Feature
- Plants
Emergency Gardening
High-tech tissue culture is helping some ultrarare plants finally have sprouts of their own.
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Old Worms, New Aging Genes
The genes and hormonal signals that regulate life span in worms may do the same in people.
- Earth
Air Sickness
Studies have begun showing subtle but substantial harmful effects in outwardly healthy people who regularly breathe hazy air.
- Earth
Catch Zero
It generally has taken less than a generation for modern, industrial-scale fishing, once deployed in a new plot of ocean, to exhaust the vast majority of the sea’s edible bounty and leave behind decimated ecosystems and depleted economic opportunities.
- Physics
Mastering the Mixer
Almost anything can happen when a batch of grains or powders is mixed—including striking, swirling patterns and spontaneous, total separation—so researchers are playing with beads, salt, sand, and other particles in simple tumblers to find out what's going on.
- Paleontology
Learning from the Present
New field studies of unfossilized bones, as well as databases full of information about current fossil excavations and previous fossil finds, are providing insights into how complete—or incomplete—Earth's fossil record may be.
- Astronomy
Supernova Spectacular
Studying starburst galaxies, relatively nearby galaxies that are undergoing a tremendous rate of star formation, may reveal how elliptical galaxies arose and black holes grew in the early universe.
- Life
All the World’s a Phage
There are an amazing number of bacteriophages—viruses that kill bacteria—in the world.
- Humans
Udder Beauty
Sophisticated screening of livestock championship winners may become as common as urine tests of Olympic athletes.
- Anthropology
The Ultimate Colonists
Human ancestors managed to adjust to life in a variety of ecosystems during the Stone Age, indicating that their social lives were more complex than they've often been given credit for.
- Materials Science
Microbial Materials
Microorganisms can be coaxed into producing high-tech components and can themselves serve as valuable ingredients in new classes of materials.
- Physics
Through the Looking Glass
A proposed universe of unseen material, where every ordinary particle has a shadowy counterpart, could explain several conundrums in cosmology.
