News
- Chemistry
Were Viking landers blind to life?
The Viking landers may have missed potential signs of life when they explored Mars in 1976.
- Earth
The African source of the Amazon’s fertilizer
More than half of the airborne dust that provides vital nutrients to the Amazonian rainforest comes from a small corner of the Sahara.
- Tech
The Little Chill: Tiny wind generator to cool microchip hot spots
By generating a tiny cooling wind, a microscale silicon needle armed with a powerful electric field has demonstrated its potential as a new way to cool increasingly hot microchips.
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Birds Beware: Several veterinary drugs may kill scavengers
Scavenging birds worldwide could be at risk of accidental poisoning from carcasses of livestock that farmers had dosed with certain anti-inflammatory drugs.
- Astronomy
New eye on the sun
The recently launched Hinode spacecraft captured an X-ray portrait of several-million-degree gas in the sun's outer atmosphere.
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Hot, Hot, Hot: Peppers and spiders reach same pain receptor
The burn of hot peppers and the searing pain of a spider bite could have a common cause.
- Health & Medicine
See How They See: Immature cells boost vision in night-blind mice
Transplanted retinal cells can restore some vision in mice with degenerative eye disease.
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Sick and Tired: Tracking paths to chronic fatigue
Stressful experiences and a genetic predisposition toward emotional turmoil contribute to some cases of chronic fatigue syndrome.
- Earth
Not So Clean: Service industries emit greenhouse gases too
Service industries such as the retail trade are creating just as much planet-warming carbon dioxide as the manufacture and operation of motor vehicles do.
- Health & Medicine
Malaria Reversal: Drug regains potency in African nation
An inexpensive drug that had lost much of its punch against malaria over the past 20 years is showing signs of regaining its strength in the African nation of Malawi.
- Paleontology
Early tetrapod likely ate on shore
The skull structure of Acanthostega, a semiaquatic creature that lived about 365 million years ago, suggests that the animal fed on shore or in the shallows, not in deep water.
- Paleontology
Society sans frills
The discovery of the fossils of several young dinosaurs in one small space suggests that the members of one dinosaur group evolved complex social behaviors millions of years earlier than previously suspected.
