News
- Computing
A loosely woven Web
The World Wide Web is less like a network of heavily interconnected superhighways and more like a jungle of one-way streets often leading to dead ends.
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Emotional gain after verbal loss
Brain-damaged people who have lost much of their ability to understand spoken sentences are better than healthy folks at picking up emotions that others are trying to conceal.
- Health & Medicine
Gene may keep breast cancer at bay
Scientists have identified a gene that seems to protect against some common breast cancers.
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Extended test for bipolar drugs
A long-term study finds some advantages for patients with manic-depressive illness taking an anticonvulsant drug, although placebos also have positive effects on this ailment.
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Spider real estate wars: Wake up early
Big spiders in a colony get prime real estate day after day by spinning webs early.
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Dolphins bray when chasing down a fish
The first high-resolution analysis of which dolphin is making which sound suggests that hunters blurt out a low-frequency, donkeylike sound that may startle prey into freezing for an instant or attract other dolphins.
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Invader ants win by losing diversity
The Argentine ants that are trouncing U.S. species derive much of their takeover power, oddly enough, from losing genetic diversity.
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Attachment disorder draws closer look
A substantial minority of children exposed to severe deprivation in institutions as infants can't form close relationships, a condition for which there is no established treatment.
- Earth
Warm band may have girdled snowball Earth
A swath a liquid ocean may have hugged the planet's midriff even during the most frigid global climatic episodes between 800 million and 600 million years ago, allowing life to survive.
- Health & Medicine
New inner ear hair cells grow in rat tissue
Using a gene known to control hair-cell growth, researchers have grown hair cells in tissue taken from newborn rats' cochleas, raising hopes that inner ear damage may someday be reversible.
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Popularity of germ fighter raises concern
The growing use of the antiseptic triclosan in products ranging from mouthwash to cutting boards and hunting clothes may create bacteria resistant to antibiotic drugs.
- Animals
The whole beehive gets a fever…
When bee larvae are fighting off disease, the nest temperature rises, so the whole hive gets a fever.
