Feature
- Earth
Solving Hazy Mysteries
Aerosols such as smoke, soot, and sea spray make for hazy vistas and stunning sunrises, but they also play major roles in Earth's climate and atmospheric chemistry.
- Animals
Mad Deer Disease?
Chronic wasting disease, once just an obscure brain ailment of deer and elk in a small patch of the West, is turning up in new places and raising troubling questions about risks.
- Earth
Taming Toxic Tides
A growing international cadre of scientists is exploring a simple strategy for controlling toxic algal blooms: flinging dirt to sweep the algae from the water.
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Code Breakers
Scientists are altering bacteria in a most fundamental way.
- Chemistry
Photography at a Crossroads
Researchers are racing to understand the chemical processes used during the past 2 centuries to make photographs before digital-imaging techniques take over completely.
- Anthropology
Care-Worn Fossils
A nearly toothless fossil jaw found in France has reignited scientific debate over whether the skeletal remains of physically disabled individuals show that our Stone Age ancestors provided life-saving care to the ill and infirm.
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Building Blocks of Talk
When babies babble, they may say a lot about speech.
- Astronomy
Something New on the Sun
The sharpest visible-light images of the sun ever recorded are revealing puzzling, new features of sunspots, the dark regions where the sun's powerful magnetic field is concentrated.
- Tech
Hot Flashes, Cold Cuts
By obliterating matter in a never-before-seen way, a new breed of lasers cuts everything from eyeballs to diamonds with unprecedented precision.
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Sizing Up the Brain
Genetic mutations that produce small brains provide insight into the formation and evolution of the human brain.
- Astronomy
Jet Astronomy
For the first time, scientists have traced the slowing and dimming of X-ray-emitting jets from a black hole.
