News

  1. Humans

    Urine tests for cities

    Analysis of sewage gauges community-wide use of illegal drugs.

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  2. Earth

    Tiny tubes, big pollution

    Making carbon nanotubes also produces a lot of airborne carcinogens.

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  3. Light switch

    A photosensitive molecule makes switching off a gene as simple as flicking on a light.

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  4. Tech

    Corny collagen

    Corn engineered to produce collagen may someday replace slaughterhouse leftovers as a source of gelatin.

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  5. Earth

    Arctic snow was dirtier in early 1900s

    Arctic snow collects less soot now than it did a century ago, but it's still dirtier than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

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  6. Animals

    Bats hum for sugar too

    Some nectar-feeding bats metabolize sugars as rapidly as hummingbirds do.

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  7. Believers gain no health advantage

    Strong religious beliefs or practices don't appear to benefit depressed or socially isolated heart attack survivors.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    When antioxidants go bad

    Overproduction of antioxidants, usually thought to be beneficial, is the cause of an inherited heart disease.

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  9. Earth

    O River Deltas, Where Art Thou? Coastal sinking stalls sediment accumulation

    The western coast of Siberia lacks river deltas because of the way the terrain has subsided since the end of the last ice age.

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  10. Physics

    Crueltyfree: Counting photons without killing them

    A delicate quantum measurement counts photons without destroying them.

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  11. Astronomy

    Separation Anxiety: Cosmic collision may shed light on dark matter

    The debris from an ancient collision of galaxy clusters seems to show cosmic dark matter behaving in a puzzling way.

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  12. Groomed for Trouble: Mice yield obsessive-compulsive insights

    Mice lacking a gene that makes a certain brain protein display behaviors much like those of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a poorly understood psychiatric ailment.

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