News
- Physics
Cold War Conductor: Ultracold plutonium compound shows no resistance
Researchers studying the crystalline properties of radioactive plutonium have discovered the first plutonium-based superconductor.
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Dog Sense: Domestication gave canines innate insight into human gestures
Dogs may have acquired an innate ability to understand human body language after they were domesticated.
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Three Dog Eves: Canine diaspora from East Asia to Americas
Genetic studies have moved the origins of dog domestication from the Middle East to East Asia and suggest that the first people to venture into the Americas brought their dogs with them.
- Health & Medicine
Virus Stopper: Vaccine could prevent most cervical cancers
A vaccine fashioned from a protein found on human papillomavirus-16 protects women from long-term viral infections that can lead to cervical cancer.
- Earth
Dioxin cuts the chance of fathering a boy
More girls than boys are fathered by men who sustained a relatively high environmental exposure to dioxin from a 1976 factory explosion in Italy.
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Viruses that slay bacteria draw new interest
Bacteriophages, viruses that kill bacteria, may be able to cure seafood poisoning, decontaminate poultry, and tackle anthrax.
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Gene therapy grows bone in mice and rats
A new gene therapy tested in rodents regrows bone by transforming skin and gum cells into bone-making cells or into cells that mass-produce a molecule called bone morphogenetic protein-7, which induces bone growth.
- Astronomy
New sky map: Look, Ma, no Milky Way!
Using a radio telescope to record emissions from hydrogen gas, astronomers have penetrated the murk of the Milky Way to map the entire southern sky.
- Earth
Bursting in Air: Satellites tally small asteroid hits
On average, a small asteroid slams into Earth's atmosphere and explodes with the energy of 1,000 Hiroshima-size blasts once every thousand years or so, a rate that is less than one-third as high as scientists previously supposed.
- Planetary Science
Leapin’ Lava! Volcanic eruption on Io breaks the record
Pointing a ground-based telescope at Jupiter's moon Io, astronomers have recorded the most powerful volcano ever observed in the solar system.
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Life or Death: Immune genes determine outcome of strep infection
Subtle variations among people's immune genes may largely account for radically different outcomes when people get a strep infection.
- Physics
Quantum quirks quicken thorny searches
A researcher has come up with a quantum algorithm for identifying one or more items in a large, unsorted database when complete information about the search target is unavailable.
