Feature

  1. Health & Medicine

    Breathing on the Edge

    Researchers are exploring how both sea-level lowlanders and high-altitude natives cope with low oxygen levels.

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  2. Things That Go Thump

    There's a whole world of animal communication by vibration that researchers are now exploring.

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  3. Humans

    Where’s the Book?

    Innovative curricula are moving science education away from a reliance on textbooks.

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  4. Humans

    Errant Texts

    New studies lambaste popular middle-school science texts for being uninspiring, superficial, and error-ridden.

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  5. Learning in Waves

    Learning plays a largely unappreciated role in mental development, according to researchers who examine the variety of tactics children adopt as they attempt to solve problems in mathematics and other areas.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Making Sense of Centenarians

    The number of centenarians is expected to double every ten years, making this formerly rare group one of the fastest-growing in the developed world. Researchers are turning to studies of the oldest old to determine how genes, lifestyle, and social factors contribute to longevity.

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  7. Physics

    Jiggling the Cosmic Ooze

    Spurred by the first tentative sightings after a decades-old search, physicists seeking the universe's mass-giving particle — the Higgs boson — have fired up the world's highest-energy particle collider to join the pursuit.

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  8. Why Fly into a Forest Fire?

    Scientists puzzle over why some wasps and beetles race to forest fires.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    The Good Trans Fat

    One arcane family of fats may be tapped to treat or prevent a host of diseases.

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  10. Astronomy

    Mining the Sky

    A proposed national virtual observatory, a mammoth computer database integrating spectra, images, and other information covering the entire sky, could usher in a new age of discovery in astronomy.

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  11. Earth

    A Nation Aflame

    In the wake of one of the worst fire seasons in the past 50 years, scientists are assessing risk as more people move into fire-prone areas and developing ways to better predict the behavior of--and the potential for--wildfires.

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  12. Materials Science

    From Metal Bars to Candy Bars

    Materials scientists have turned the tools of their trade on some of the most familiar substances in the world: food.

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