News
- Earth
Feel the Heat: Rain forests may slow their growth in warmer world
During a long-term research project in a Central American rain forest, mature trees grew more slowly in warm years than they did in cooler ones.
-
Fig-Wasp Upset: Classic partnership isn’t so tidy after all
Genetic analysis suggests that a textbook example of a tight buddy system in nature—fig species that supposedly each have their own pollinating wasp species—may need to be rewritten.
- Math
Spheres in Disguise: Solid proof offered for famous conjecture
A Russian mathematician has proposed a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a question about the shapes of three-dimensional spaces.
- Health & Medicine
Teen taters, too
The epidemic of adolescent obesity may owe more to a paucity of exercise than to a growing intake of calories.
- Health & Medicine
Athletes develop whey-better muscles
Dietary supplements coupling whey and creatine promote the development of bigger, stronger muscles in experienced body builders.
- Earth
Prenatal nicotine: A role in SIDS?
New data suggest why exposure to nicotine in the womb can put an infant at greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
- Health & Medicine
Little vessels react to magnetic switch
Magnets can act like vascular switches, increasing or decreasing blood flow to a region of the body.
- Earth
Traces of lead cause outsize harm
Minute amounts of lead in blood are worse for children than had been realized.
- Paleontology
Ancestors Go South
A group of new and previously excavated fossils in South Africa represents 4-million-year-old members of the human evolutionary family, according to an analysis of the sediment that covered the finds.
- Animals
Chicks open wide, ultraviolet mouths
The first analysis of what the mouths of begging birds look like in the ultraviolet spectrum reveals a dramatic display that birds can see but people can't.
- Physics
Answer blows in wind, swirls in soap
A swirling soap film gives new clues to how turbulent flows, such as the circulation of Earth's atmosphere, squander their energy.
- Astronomy
Telescope takes close-ups of distant star
Radio astronomers have for the first time probed ejected gas in the immediate surroundings of a distant star.
