News
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Dancing with feeling
Indian classical dance provides a new way for scientists to explore cross-cultural understanding of emotions.
- Planetary Science
X rays reveal Eros’ primitive nature
Aided by a blast of X rays from the sun, a spacecraft orbiting the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros has gathered preliminary evidence that the rock is a primitive relic, apparently unchanged since the birth of the solar system.
- Physics
Light pulses flout sacrosanct speed limit
Faster-than-light firsts: Restless laser pulse leaves before it arrives, while merging microwaves send out a superluminal scout.
- Astronomy
Survey confirms composition of the cosmos
A team of astronomers announced this week that after measuring the redshifts of 100,000 galaxies, they have new evidence for what makes up most of the mass of the universe.
- Tech
Deadly Bubble Bath: Ultrasound fizz kills microbes under pressure
A modest pressure increase on a liquid agitated by ultrasound dramatically boosts the microbe-killing power of those high-frequency sound waves.
- Astronomy
Hubble Weighs In: Pinning down an extrasolar planet’s mass
Using a decades-old technique, astronomers have precisely measured the mass of a planet outside our solar system.
- Materials Science
Nanotube ID: New signatures aid nanotech progress
Researchers have developed a means for rapidly distinguishing among 33 semiconducting varieties of carbon nanotubes.
- Health & Medicine
Cluster Bombs: Metabolic syndrome tied to heart disease deaths
Men with a certain cluster of metabolic characteristics are about three times as likely to die of heart disease as men without the traits are.
- Animals
Frogs Play Tree: Male tunes his call to specific tree hole
Borneo's tree-hole frog may come as close to playing a musical instrument as any wild animal does. [With audio file.]
- Health & Medicine
Jarring Result: Extreme biking can hurt men’s fertility
Men who maintain grueling mountain-bicycling programs are apt to have lower sperm counts than nonbikers are.
- Anthropology
Script Delivery: New World writing takes disputed turn
Researchers announced, to considerable controversy, that inscriptions found on artifacts at an Olmec site in southeastern Mexico represented the earliest known writing system in the Americas.
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Debate over Alzheimer’s enzyme flares up
Scientists continue to tussle over the identity of an enzyme implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
