News
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Seminal Discovery: Promiscuous females speed sperm evolution
A gene responsible for semen viscosity has evolved more rapidly in primate species with promiscuous females than in monogamous species.
- 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.
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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.
- Archaeology
Pompeii’s burial not its first disaster
Recent excavations reveal that the city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, experienced several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its demise.
- Earth
Dead zones may record river floods
Microorganisms that live in seafloor sediments deposited beneath periodically anoxic waters near the mouths of rivers could chronicle the years when those rivers flooded for extended periods.
- Earth
Lead’s a moving target at rifle ranges
The lead used in bullets and shotgun pellets can be a threat to the environment near rifle ranges but many of its hazards are manageable.
- Physics
Spinning Earth drags space
Slight deviations of two Earth-circling satellites from their expected orbits appear to confirm a curious prediction from Einstein's relativity theory.
- Chemistry
Cleaning up anthrax
Chemists have developed catalysts that spur common oxidants to quickly destroy germs, including deadly anthrax spores.
- Astronomy
Belt Tightening: Icy orbs are surprisingly small
Objects in the distant reservoir of comets known as the Kuiper belt are intrinsically much brighter, and therefore smaller, than previously thought.
- Health & Medicine
Lingering Loss: In 2-year diet trial, new pill keeps off weight
Obese adults who lose weight during a year of taking an experimental diet drug, rimonabant, and dieting keep the weight off during the following year, if they continue the regimen.
