News
- Chemistry
Nitrogen Unbound: New reaction breaks strong chemical link
Researchers have developed a new way to turn nitrogen into ammonia that could improve upon an energy-intensive, 90-year-old method used to make fertilizers.
- Animals
Fish in the dark still size up mates
Female cave fish still have their ancestral preference for a large male, even though it's too dark to see him.
- Health & Medicine
Malaria drug boosts recovery rates
Adding the herbal-extract drug artesunate to standard malaria treatment reduces the relapse rate, even in areas where the malaria parasite is resistant to standard drugs.
- Materials Science
Light whips platinum into shape
Scientists are exploiting the molecular machinery behind photosynthesis to create unique nanostructures out of platinum.
- Chemistry
Nature’s tiniest rotor runs like clockwork
By manipulating a tiny protein found in most living cells, researchers created a molecular rotor that can convert mechanical motion into chemical energy.
- Health & Medicine
Busy hospitals may not be best choice
A large number of heart surgeries done at a hospital doesn't always correlate with a low mortality rate from such operations at the facility.
- Earth
Ice-dammed lakes had cooling effect
New computer simulations suggest that massive lakes in northern Russia—formed when an ice sheet blocked the northward flow of rivers about 90,000 years ago—significantly cooled the region's climate in summer months.
- Humans
Better protection from mad cow disease
The Food and Drug Administration has announced several new measures to keep meat that's potentially infected with mad cow disease out of food supplies.
- Health & Medicine
Surgery removes grenade from soldier’s head
Colombian military doctors extracted an intact grenade from the head of a teenage soldier.
- Humans
The Chosen: A New Crop of Scientific Minds; Student science competition announces finalists
Forty high school students from 14 states and the District of Columbia have been selected to compete for the top prizes in the 2004 Intel Science Talent Search.
- Animals
Vanishing Vultures: Bird deaths linked to vet-drug residues
The recent puzzling crash in vulture populations in Pakistan comes not from some new disease but from exposure to veterinary drug residues in livestock carcasses.
- Materials Science
Pumping Carbon: Researchers watch nanofibers grow
The first atomic-scale movies of carbon nanofiber growth show particles of a metal catalyst pulsating wildly while carbon and metal atoms scuttle across the particle’s surface.
