News
- Astronomy
Outlier Planet: Extrasolar places that are like home
A team of veteran hunters of planets outside the solar system has come up with a landmark finding: a Jupiterlike planet orbiting a Sunlike star at a Jupiterlike distance.
By Ron Cowen - Health & Medicine
Smart Drugs: Leukemia treatments nearing prime time
Three new drugs stop acute myeloid leukemia in mice, suggesting the treatments will work in people with this deadly blood cancer.
By Nathan Seppa - Physics
Voyager spacecraft still buffeted by sun
Even though the two Voyager probes launched in 1977 passed the outermost planets in our solar system more than a decade ago, their sensors show that they can't yet outrun the influence of solar flares.
By Sid Perkins - Earth
Famed undersea vent may be lost
When scientists last month tried to revisit an undersea hydrothermal vent first discovered nearly a quarter of a century ago, they found the site desolate, possibly paved by a fresh volcanic eruption.
By Sid Perkins - Earth
Mangled microfossils may mark impact sites
Scientists studying sediment cores drilled in eastern Virginia say they’ve possibly identified a new clue to the locations of ancient, hidden impact craters: Just look for broken or twisted microbial fossils.
By Sid Perkins - Humans
Small lab animals exempted from law
The new farm bill explicitly exempts rats, mice, and birds from coverage under the federal Animal Welfare Act.
By Janet Raloff - Health & Medicine
Chemical stops allergic reaction in tests
Researchers have developed a protein that short-circuits allergic reactions in mice and in tissue cultures of human cells.
- Animals
Bay leaves may make rat nests nicer
Wood rats may be fumigating their nests with bits of California bay leaves, sprigs that killed flea larvae in lab tests.
By Susan Milius - Health & Medicine
Shuttling medicines via blood cells
Researchers have developed a way of encapsulating drugs in red blood cells, which can be used to deliver low doses of anti-inflammatory drugs to cystic fibrosis patients.
- Chemistry
Oxidized plutonium reaches a higher state
A new understanding of the basic chemistry of plutonium could affect the way nuclear waste is stored.
By Corinna Wu - Physics
Old data yield new signs of extra force
Several experimental findings that conflict with predictions of the prevailing standard model of particle physics suggest that nature may include another force beyond the four known ones.
By Peter Weiss - Paleontology
All mixed up over birds and dinosaurs
A bit of fossil fakery snookered a team of paleontologists