News
- Earth
Damp sandcastles
What keeps the 500-meter-tall dunes of China's Badain Jaran desert immobile, despite arid, windy conditions, is a previously unknown source of groundwater.
- Animals
Color at Night: Geckos can distinguish hues by dim moonlight
The first vertebrate to ace tests of color vision at low light levels—tests that people flunk—is an African gecko.
-
Neural Feel for Seeing: Emotion may mold early visual activity in brain
The amygdala, an inner-brain structure that coordinates reactions to fearful sights, influences early stages of visual perception in far-removed brain regions.
- Health & Medicine
Umbilical Bounty: Cord blood shows value against leukemia
Umbilical cord blood transplants offer a viable treatment alternative for leukemia patients who don't have a matching bone marrow donor.
- Paleontology
Subway dig in L.A. yields fossil trove
Fossil finds made when a subway line was extended from Los Angeles into the San Fernando Valley include bones of mastodons, ground sloths, extinct bison and camels, and 39 new species of fish.
-
Nightlife: Marsupial meets mistletoe
A tiny marsupial in Argentina turns out to disperse mistletoe seeds, a job once presumed to be for the birds.
-
Great tits inherit egg spots from mom
An unusual study of eggshell spots suggests that there may be a gene for spottiness on the great tit's female sex chromosome.
- Tech
Ink-jet dots form transistor spots
A new technique makes ink-jet printing of transistor circuits possible from conductive polymer inks.
- Chemistry
Researchers stretch for improved surfaces
A surprisingly simple, new technique could create better coatings for everything from medical implants to ship hulls.
- Math
Proof clarifies a map-folding problem
Researchers have developed an efficient algorithm to determine, given a collection of creases on a piece of paper, whether a sequence of simple folds produces a flat result, like a folded road map.
- Animals
Birds may inherit their taste for the town
Tests switching cliff swallow nestlings to colonies of different sizes suggest the birds inherit their preference for group size.
- Health & Medicine
Drugs counteract irritable bowel syndrome
Antibiotics can knock out bacteria overload in the small intestine, temporarily reversing irritable bowel syndrome.
