News
- Planetary Science
To the moon, European style
The European Space Agency launched its first lunar mission, which is scheduled to reach the moon in 2005 and will search for water that may lie in the moon's permanently shadowed craters.
- Health & Medicine
Do Arctic diets protect prostates?
Marine diets appear to explain why the incidence of prostate cancer among Inuit men is lower than that of males anywhere else in the world.
- Paleontology
Reptile remains fill in fossil record
The fossil remains of a sphenodontian, an ancient, lizardlike reptile, are helping fill a 120-million-year-old gap between this creature's ancestors and today's tuatara, sole survivors of the once prominent group.
- Earth
Toxic Controversy: Perchlorate found in milk, but risk is debated
Researchers in Texas have detected the chemical perchlorate in milk, crops, and a significant portion of the state's groundwater.
- Humans
Nobel prizes go to scientists harnessing odd phenomena
The 2003 Nobel prizes in the sciences were announced early this week.
- Neuroscience
Restoring Recall: Memories may form and reform, with sleep
Two new studies indicate that memories, at least for skills learned in a laboratory, undergo a process of storage and restorage that depends critically on sleep.
- Animals
Bad Bubbles: Could sonar give whales the bends?
Odd bubbles of fat and gas have turned up in the bodies of marine mammals, raising the question of whether something about human activity in the oceans could give these deep divers decompression sickness.
- Tech
Special Delivery: Metallic nanorods shuttle genes
A new gene therapy technique relies on nanorods made of gold and nickel to deliver genes to cells in the body.
- Astronomy
Super Data: Hail the cosmic revolution
Ten extremely distant supernovas recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope provide evidence that something is pushing objects in the cosmos apart at an ever-faster rate.
- Earth
Scrutinized chemicals linger in atmosphere
The newly determined longevity in the atmosphere of certain perfluorinated chemicals indicates that they may disperse environmental contamination far and wide.
- Physics
Cassini confirms Einstein’s theory
En route to a 2004 rendezvous with Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has verified a key prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity to an accuracy 50 times better than that of previous measurements.
- Health & Medicine
Was President Taft cognitively impaired?
President William Howard Taft apparently had sleep apnea, a breathing disorder that could explain his propensity to nod off.
