News
- Earth
Mercury Rising: Natural wildfires release pollutant
Fires in high-latitude forests and peaty soils of the Northern Hemisphere may loft hundreds of tons of mercury into the atmosphere each year.
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Pathogen Preference: Infected amoebas flourish in cooling towers
Cooling towers appear to be more effective than natural waters at fostering novel bacterial species that cause illnesses in people.
- Chemistry
Lacy molecular order
A lacy honeycomb arrangement of molecules on copper suggests the possibility of creating useful nanoscale patterns on surfaces by fine-tuning intermolecular forces.
- Animals
Underage Spiders: Males show unexpected interest in young mates
Male Australian redback spiders mate readily with females too young to have external openings to their reproductive tracts, a tactic that reduces the male's risk of getting cannibalized.
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Sweet Finding: Researchers propose candidate sour sensor
A protein on the surfaces of select tongue cells may play a pivotal role in detecting sour taste.
- Math
Fields Medals: Mathematicians win awards for geometry, physics, and probability
Fields Medals have been awarded to four mathematicians, including Grigori Perelman, who proved a famous conjecture about the shapes of higher-dimensional spheres.
- Health & Medicine
Risky Legacy: African DNA linked to prostate cancer
The high rate of prostate cancer among African American men may result in large part from a newly identified stretch of DNA passed down from their African ancestors.
- Astronomy
Enlightened: Dark matter spotted after cosmic crash
In the aftermath of a cosmic crash between two galaxies, researchers say they've detected invisible dark matter for the first time.
- Health & Medicine
Breast milk may not be enough
Breast-fed infants need vitamin D supplements, at least in winter.
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Placebo predictions
Giving patients placebo pills for a week before they begin to participate in trials of antidepressants can help clinicians gauge how well they will respond to the actual medication.
- Tech
The ups and downs of routing fluids on chips
A new way to build microscale pipes in three dimensions boosts the sophistication of chips that manipulate fluids to perform chemical reactions and other tasks.
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Unusual tumor is contagious in dogs
A type of cancer in dogs is transferred from animal to animal by exchange of cancer cells.
