News
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Boys take a tumble
A long-term study of children from grades 1 through 12 finds a disturbing tendency for boys to report much larger declines in appraisals of their academic abilities than do girls.
- Astronomy
Sharper Images: New Hubble camera goes the distance
Astronomers have unveiled a picture of the distant universe that ranks as the sharpest and most detailed ever recorded.
- Health & Medicine
Cancer Link Cooks Up Doubt: Heating may form potential carcinogen in food
Foods cooked at high temperatures contain large concentrations of acrylamide, a compound suspected to cause cancer in people, but researchers are cautious about acting on preliminary, unpublished data.
- Astronomy
Faded Stars Get New Role: Hubble takes a long look
By setting their sights on the galaxy's faintest stars, scientists have calculated the universe's age to be between 13 billion and 14 billion years old.
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All Cried Out: Major depression puts lid on tears
A new study suggests that depressed individuals cry no more often in response to a sad situation than nondepressed people do.
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Rescue Rat: Could wired rodents save the day?
Researchers have wired a rat's brain so that someone at a laptop computer can steer the animal through mazes and over rubble.
- Paleontology
Ancient Whodunit: Scientists indict wee suspects in ancient deaths
Evidence locked in 180,000-year-old sediments suggests that a toxic algae bloom was the cause of death for a large group of mammals that were fossilized intact on an ancient lake bottom.
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Small Wonder: Microbial hitchhiker has few genes
Scientists have identified a microbe with remarkably few genes living on another microbe on the ocean floor.
- Earth
In case of temblor, run downhill
Computer models of the ground motions measured on a shallow hill during an earthquake suggest that, in certain circumstances, the ground movements could be magnified by as much as 10 times those measured on flat areas nearby.
- Humans
In USSR, generals did it by the numbers
A statistical analysis of the dates and times of Soviet underground nuclear tests suggests that the favorite numbers of the test-site commander may have had a significant influence upon the precise timing of the detonations.
- Earth
Monitors get weird vibes from Antarctic
In late 2000, seismometers on islands in the South Pacific picked up vibrations that were eventually traced to a large iceberg drifting in the Ross Sea north of Antarctica.
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Brain keeps tabs on arbitrary patterns
Several parts of the frontal brain cooperatively identify apparent regularities in random sequences of events and detect breaks in those patterns.
