News
- Earth
Inhaled particles damage vascular lining
Airborne soot and other pollutant particles can impair the ability of tiny vessels in the body to properly regulate blood flow, an animal study finds.
- Math
Con Artist: Scanning program can discern true art
A new mathematical tool distills painting style into an array of statistics as a potential means to spot forgeries.
- Astronomy
Extrasolar Planet News: Superplanet or brown dwarf?
New observations of an oddball planetary system 150 light-years from Earth suggest that some planets either are superheavy, more than 17 times as massive as Jupiter, or that they form from disks of gas and dust that encircle not just a single star, but two starlike objects.
- Materials Science
Transparent Transistor: See-through component for flexible displays
Transparent transistors deposited on flexible sheets of plastic could find their way into computer displays embedded in car windshields and other curved surfaces.
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Seminal Discovery: Promiscuous females speed sperm evolution
A gene responsible for semen viscosity has evolved more rapidly in primate species with promiscuous females than in monogamous species.
- Earth
Damp sandcastles
What keeps the 500-meter-tall dunes of China's Badain Jaran desert immobile, despite arid, windy conditions, is a previously unknown source of groundwater.
- Animals
Color at Night: Geckos can distinguish hues by dim moonlight
The first vertebrate to ace tests of color vision at low light levels—tests that people flunk—is an African gecko.
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Neural Feel for Seeing: Emotion may mold early visual activity in brain
The amygdala, an inner-brain structure that coordinates reactions to fearful sights, influences early stages of visual perception in far-removed brain regions.
- Health & Medicine
Umbilical Bounty: Cord blood shows value against leukemia
Umbilical cord blood transplants offer a viable treatment alternative for leukemia patients who don't have a matching bone marrow donor.
- Paleontology
Subway dig in L.A. yields fossil trove
Fossil finds made when a subway line was extended from Los Angeles into the San Fernando Valley include bones of mastodons, ground sloths, extinct bison and camels, and 39 new species of fish.
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Nightlife: Marsupial meets mistletoe
A tiny marsupial in Argentina turns out to disperse mistletoe seeds, a job once presumed to be for the birds.
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Great tits inherit egg spots from mom
An unusual study of eggshell spots suggests that there may be a gene for spottiness on the great tit's female sex chromosome.
