News
- Plants
Herbal therapy for beleaguered lawns
Mustard and other herbal remedies can thwart turf attacks by root-feeding roundworms.
By Janet Raloff - Earth
Main source of airborne pollen varies by month
A 15-year study conducted in the New York City area charts how air concentrations of different types of allergy-causing pollen vary throughout an average year.
By Ben Harder - Materials Science
Greenhouse Glass: Squeezing and heating carbon dioxide yields exotic, see-through solid
Researchers have forged solid glass from carbon dioxide.
By Peter Weiss - Health & Medicine
Wasting Away: Prozac loses promise as anorexia nervosa fighter
Although often prescribed for people with anorexia nervosa, the popular antidepressant medication Prozac offers no better protection against the potentially fatal eating disorder than placebo pills do.
By Bruce Bower - Paleontology
Ancient webbed masters
Newly unearthed fossils of a 110-million-year-old bolster the notion that all modern birds evolved from aquatic ancestors.
By Sid Perkins -
Fat Friends: Gut-microbe partners bring in more calories
The collaborative efforts of two common gut microbes could increase the calories that a person extracts from food and store as fat, a study in mice suggests.
- Earth
Mineral Deposit: Asbestos linked to lupus, arthritis
Already known to cause lung cancer, asbestos has now been associated with three autoimmune diseases.
By Eric Jaffe - Chemistry
Carbon Goes Glam: Treated carbon dots fluoresce
Chemists have fashioned tiny dots of carbon that glow in response to light.
- Animals
Mixed Butterflies: Tropical species joins ranks of rare hybrids
A South American butterfly is one of the few animal species that seems to have arisen via the supposedly rare path of crossing two older species.
By Susan Milius - Health & Medicine
Next Line of Defense: New drugs take on resistant leukemia
Two experimental drugs stop many cases of chronic myeloid leukemia that are resistant to the drug imatinib (Gleevec).
By Nathan Seppa - Earth
Cleaning up pollution, whey down deep
Lab and field tests hint that dairy whey, a lactose-rich by-product of the dairy industry, could be used to clean up underground water supplies tainted by the solvent trichloroethylene.
By Sid Perkins - Earth
Subglacial lakes may not be isolated ecosystems
Large volumes of water may occasionally flow between the lakes that lie deep beneath Antarctica's kilometers-thick ice sheet.
By Sid Perkins