News
- Animals
Crow Tools: Hatched to putter
The New Caledonian crow is the first vertebrate to be shown definitively to have an innate tendency to make and use tools, according to researchers who doubled as bird nannies.
- Earth
Living in a Fog: Secondhand smoke may dull kids’ wits
Millions of U.S. children may have reading deficits because of exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke.
- Health & Medicine
Not to Your Health: New mechanism proposed for alcohol-related tumors
New findings suggest that alcohol encourages blood vessels to invade tumors, supplying nutrients that promote tumor growth.
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Hands-on Math Insights: Teachers’ mismatched gestures boost learning
As teachers instruct a child, they typically use their hands as well as their voices, but only certain gestures pack a powerful educational punch.
- Paleontology
Reptilian Repast: Ancient mammals preyed on young dinosaurs
Two nearly complete sets of fossilized remains from 130-million-year-old rocks are revealing fresh details about the size and dietary habits of ancient mammals, hinting that some of these creatures were large enough to feast on small dinosaurs.
- Math
When Laziness Pays: Math explains how cooperation and cheating evolve
Researchers have developed a mathematical model that helps explain how cooperation and cheating evolve among simple organisms.
- Astronomy
Ultimate Retro: Modern echoes of the early universe
Two teams of astronomers have for the first time detected the surviving notes of a cosmic symphony created just after the Big Bang, when the universe was a foggy soup of matter and radiation.
- Health & Medicine
Antibiotics could save nerves
Penicillin and its family of related antibiotics may prevent the type of nerve damage that occurs in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other diseases.
- Animals
Sparrows learn song from pieces
Young white-crowned sparrows don't have to hear a song straight through in order to learn it; playing the song in mixed-up paired phrases will do.
- Earth
Really hot water
Hot-water tanks can accumulate radioactive deposits from naturally occurring radioactive material.
- Earth
Landscaping stones may pose risks to the environment
Chemical analyses suggest that planting ornamental rock gardens in some cases may not be doing the environment any favors.
- Earth
Big quakes can free grounded icebergs
Data gathered by equipment installed on an immense iceberg off Antarctica suggest that the ground motions spawned by large, distant earthquakes can free such bergs to float again.
