News
- Astronomy
Dance of the dead
Astronomers have found what appears to be the fastest-spinning stellar corpse known.
- Tech
Unlocking the Gaits: Robot tests locomotion switch
A blocky, bright-yellow robot that would look at home in a toy chest moves like a salamander, just as its inventors intended.
- Math
Functional Family: Mock theta mystery solved
Mathematicians have solved a legendary Indian mathematician's final problem.
- Earth
High and Dry: Pollution may stifle mountain precipitation
Trends seen in meteorological data gathered on a Chinese mountaintop suggest that air pollution reduces the amount of precipitation that falls in high-altitude regions.
- Humans
Bad Influence: TV, movies linked to adolescent smoking
White adolescents who have frequent exposure to television and R-rated movies are more likely to try smoking than are their peers with less exposure to these media.
- Planetary Science
Saturn’s rings: A panoramic perspective
Sailing high above Saturn's equator, NASA's Cassini spacecraft took the most sweeping views of the planet's icy rings ever recorded.
-
Schizophrenia Plus and Minus: Cognitive course nudges patients into workforce
Antipsychotic drugs exert disappointingly modest effects on the quality of life of people with schizophrenia, although a new cognitive-training program shows promise as a way to get these psychiatric patients into the workforce.
- Animals
Mafia Cowbirds: Do they muscle birds that don’t play ball?
A new test offers the best evidence yet that cowbirds retaliate against birds that resist their egg scams.
-
Living Long on Less? Mouse and human cells respond to slim diets
Some animals live longer on reduced-calorie diets, and in a recent experiment people on such diets had many of the cellular changes that those long-lived animals did.
-
Body clock affects racing prowess
When it comes to athletic performance, we're all night owls, a new study suggests.
- Archaeology
Spicy finds from before Columbus
Ancient Americans cultivated and ate chili peppers at least 6,100 years ago, setting the stage for the spicy condiment to spread throughout the world after Columbus' voyages to the New World.
- Earth
DNA pinpoints poached ivory tusks
Scientists tracked the origin of an illegal ivory shipment to Zambia by using an improved DNA-analysis technique to study the confiscated tusks.
