Uncategorized
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Health & Medicine
Dengue strikes United States
Texas has been hit with the first-ever outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever in the continental United States.
By Nathan Seppa -
Animals
Ivory-billed hopes flit to Florida
There's no photo, but a team of ornithologists says that its sightings suggest that a few ivory-billed woodpeckers still live along the Choctawhatchee River in Florida.
By Susan Milius -
Physics
Electromagnetism could ease the flow in oil pipelines
A few minutes of exposure to a magnetic or electric field sharply reduces crude oil's viscosity for hours at a time.
By Peter Weiss -
Itsy bitsy genome
Researchers have sequenced the smallest genome yet discovered, a string of DNA belonging to a species of bacterium that lives inside sap-eating insects' guts.
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Astronomy
Feeling the heat of an extrasolar planet
Astronomers have measured the temperature variation between the lit and unlit sides of a planet outside the solar system.
By Ron Cowen -
19749
This article made me wonder how long a gas planet is expected to survive when one of its faces is more than 1,000°C. The conventional model of our solar system assumes that gas planets can form and survive only in a cold region of space. This implies that Upsilon Andromedae b moved to its present […]
By Science News -
Planetary Science
Satanic Winds
Dust devils send prodigious amounts of dust into Earth's atmosphere, and on Mars the electric fields generated by the dusty vortices may actually stimulate changes in atmospheric chemistry that sterilize the soil.
By Sid Perkins -
19748
I am amazed that this article concluded that “Scientists have a long way to go to explain why” prey animals play dead. As a veterinarian, I have learned that there are separate centers in the brain dealing with predatory behavior and with hunger. The effect seems to be that predatory behavior, by itself, is satisfying, […]
By Science News -
Animals
Why Play Dead?
Common wisdom dictates that playing dead discourages predators, but researchers are now thinking harder about how, or whether, that strategy really works.
By Susan Milius -
Humans
Letters from the October 28, 2006, issue of Science News
Slow down a minute “Braking news: Disks slow down stars” (SN: 8/12/06, p. 109) says that a magnetic linkage between spinning stars and the charged particles in the dusty disks that surround them slowed the spin of the stars, but says nothing about its effect on the disk. The law of conservation of angular momentum […]
By Science News -
Humans
From the October 17, 1936, issue
A million volts to fight cancer, relief from migraines, and differing sensitivity to sound.
By Science News