News
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- Health & Medicine
Stopping platelets at the source
An experimental treatment may prevent harmful clotting and less need for drugs that increase bleeding risk, a study in baboons shows.
By Nathan Seppa - Animals
Climate change may favor couch-potato elk
With drought and rising temperatures in Wyoming, migratory animals suffer while stay-at-home members of the same herd thrive
By Susan Milius - Life
Baby’s first bacteria depend on birth route
C-section newborns may harbor fewer helpful microbes than infants born vaginally.
- Anthropology
Lucy fossil gets jolted upright by Big Man
Scientists have unearthed a 3.6-million-year-old partial hominid skeleton that may recast the iconic species as humanlike walkers.
By Bruce Bower - Earth
Even a newborn canyon is big in Texas
A flood carved a surprisingly large gorge that may help understand features on Earth and Mars.
By Sid Perkins - Space
Wet past for Red Planet
An ocean blanketed one-third of Mars about 3.5 billion years ago, a new study suggests.
By Ron Cowen - Physics
Physics in free fall
Physicists drop supercold atoms down an elevator shaft to see what will happen.
- Humans
For sight-reading music, practice doesn’t make perfect
Individual memory differences may set upper limits on pianists’ sight-reading skill, regardless of their experience.
By Bruce Bower - Health & Medicine
Genetic defect tied to autoimmune diseases
Rare mutations in an enzyme lead to several different disorders.
- Space
All flash, no crash
New Hubble Space Telescope images confirm that Jupiter emerged unscathed from an impactor that created a fireball above the planet’s cloud tops on June 3. The new images indicate that the object exploded as a meteor in the planet’s upper atmosphere rather than plunging into the atmosphere
By Ron Cowen - Space
Kepler craft reports apparent planetary bonanza
New results from an orbiting telescope promise to more than double the number of known extrasolar planets.
By Ron Cowen