News
- Health & Medicine
Deadly Pickup: Enzyme permits plague germ to ride in fleas
Acquisition of a gene that enables the plague bacterium to live inside blood-sucking fleas may have set the stage for the Black Death.
- Earth
The Silent Type: Pacific Northwest hit routinely by nonquakes
Once every 14 months or so, portions of coastal British Columbia and northwestern Washington State experience a slow ground motion that, if released all at once, would generate an earthquake measuring more than 6 on the Richter scale.
- Astronomy
Super Wallops: Tracking the origin of cosmic rays
Two new studies shed light on the longstanding mystery of where cosmic rays—the energetic charged particles that bombard our galaxy—originate.
- Health & Medicine
Risk Factor: Genetic defect hikes breast cancer threat
A mutation already linked to several types of cancer doubles the risk of breast cancer in a woman and multiplies men's slight risk of the disease even more dramatically.
- Health & Medicine
Put Out to Pasture: Strategy to prolong antibiotics’ potency
The use of antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals hastens the end of their medical effectiveness.
- Health & Medicine
Shocking findings
Implanted defibrillators reduce the occurrence of sudden death by about a third among people who had previous heart attacks and continue to suffer impaired heart function.
- Earth
Smog’s ozone spawns funky carpet smells
Strange, unpleasant odors may emanate from carpets for years due to reactions caused by exposure to smoggy air.
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Whazzits get their own insect order
Insect specimens that have puzzled museum curators for decades turn out to represent a lineage so odd that scientists have named a new order just for them.
- Chemistry
Fluorine atoms used to cut nanotubes
Researchers have found that they can cut carbon nanotubes into short, potentially useful pieces using a technique for adding groups of atoms to nanotubes.
- Chemistry
Unlikely ion made in lab
Chemists have created a molecule—the pentamethylcyclopentadienyl cation—that many researchers thought was too unstable to exist long enough to be identified or studied.
- Astronomy
Strange Stars? Odd features hint at novel matter
Two stellar corpses thought to be made of neutrons may actually contain weird forms of matter never observed before.
- Animals
Big-Eyed Birds Sing Early Songs: Dawn chorus explained
Researchers report a strong relationship between eye size and the light intensity at which birds start to sing in the morning.
