News
- Health & Medicine
Smoking Gun? Mouse tests link nicotine to crib death
Nicotine may impair a molecule that's necessary for arousing people and other animals from sleep, an effect that could account for the heightened risk of sudden infant death syndrome in babies born to women who smoked during pregnancy.
- Materials Science
Better-Built Diamonds: Fast growth, purity may multiply uses
A research group has fabricated the purest diamonds ever made or found, and another has devised a way to grow high-quality diamonds up to 100 times faster than typical growth rates.
- Humans
Small Steps: World Summit delegates wrangle over eco-friendly future
Twenty thousand delegates from around the world met in Johannesburg last week for a contentious World Summit on Sustainable Development.
- Astronomy
Birth of a Tiny Galaxy: In the universe, dwarfs may pop up last
Using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe a tiny galaxy still in the process of being born, astronomers are getting a rare glimpse of how larger galaxies formed early in the history of the universe.
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Distressing Dispatches: Some journalists feel stress wounds of war
A substantial and largely unnoticed minority of war reporters and photographers develops symptoms of a severe stress reaction as a result of the job.
- Chemistry
Money Allergies: Two-toned euro coins shed metallic allergen
The two-alloy composition of some euro coins makes them release large amounts of nickel, a common skin allergen.
- Astronomy
Super fireworks
A blast wave from supernova 1987A, the brightest stellar explosion witnessed from Earth since 1604, has begun lighting up a ring of gas surrounding the explosion.
- Astronomy
No signal from Mars Polar Lander
A radio signal that NASA hoped came from the vanished Mars Polar Lander has a terrestrial origin, scientists from the space agency and Stanford University have concluded.
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Is that salamander virus flying?
Scientists searching for the carrier of the iridovirus causing a salamander disease have dismissed frogs and fish, but not birds.
- Chemistry
Rooting for new antimicrobial drugs
A compound from a tree found throughout tropical Africa could prove useful as a topical antifungal medication.
- Physics
Electron spins pass imposing frontier
Electron spins crossed from one semiconductor to another with apparent ease and little or no mussing of their direction, suggesting that sandwiches of materials common in microcircuits are no obstacle to creating spin-information channels in future circuits.
- Agriculture
Sprawling over croplands
Satellite imagery indicates that sprawling urban development has been disproportionately gobbling up those lands best able to support crops.
