News
- Space
Hubble suddenly quiet
Updated September 30: After the orbiting observatory suddenly stopped transmitting data, NASA announced planned repair mission will be delayed at least until early next year
By Ron Cowen - Paleontology
Forget bird-brained
Scientists have uncovered a new dinosaur that breathed like a bird.
- Life
Curtain drops after ants’ final act
A handful of ants remain outside to close the colony door at sunset and sacrifice their lives in the act.
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Largest known prime number found
Featured Math Trek column: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a cooperative computing project, helps find a prime that has nearly 13 million digits.
- Space
With a twinkle, pulsating stars could deliver signals from E.T.
Neutrino beams may turn Cepheids into messengers for advanced alien civilizations.
By Ron Cowen - Space
Galaxies on the move
Scientists discover "dark flow" -- the unexplained streaming of galactic clusters across the universe.
- Humans
The first sound bites
During the 1908 presidential race, Taft and Bryan sounded off in a new way as use of the phonograph got serious.
By Ron Cowen -
Gene therapy tool would target free radicals
New method would make the most of the balance between the good and bad of free radicals, offering a potential treatment for cardiovascular diseases.
- Earth
Tough meteorite made a big impact
The stony meteorite that landed in a remote portion of Peru in September 2007 was traveling abnormally fast when it struck and blasted a crater that was unusually large for the its size, new analyses indicate.
By Sid Perkins - Life
X chromosome is extra diverse
Men who father children with multiple women are responsible for “extra” diversity on the X chromosome, a new study of six different populations suggests.
- Life
Safer creation of stem cells
A new technique for converting adult cells to stem cells avoids dangerous mutations in cell DNA
- Humans
Teaching babies to err
A puzzling error that infants make in a hiding game arises from their inherent tendency to interpret others’ behavior, a research team contends.
By Bruce Bower