1,393 results
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- Physics
Physics could unite plankton
Oceanic version of wind shear can disorient marine microorganisms and trigger formation of thin, densely populated layers.
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Botanical Whales
Adventures in the Tortugas reveal that seagrass fields need saving too.
- Earth
Steven Chu’s Senate Confirmation Looks Certain
Senate energy committee appreciates Obama's pick for Secretary of Energy.
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Science for science writers
Science News blogs from Austin, Texas, where the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting is taking place. Freelance Laura Beil describes how Skip Garner began his accidental journey into scientific misconduct investigation after he developed a computer program that could, as he put it, “help a physicist understand medicine,” he told writers in the audience at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing symposium. Got milk tolerance? Your ability to digest lactose as an adult is relatively new in the human species. And, said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides evidence of rapid evolution over the past 10,000 years, Elizabeth Quill reports in this blog from the meeting. Virgil Griffith’s life goal is “to create a machine who feels.” Griffith, a doctoral student at Caltech, isn’t the only one. During his talk, he revealed that turning people into cyborgs is the secret passion of many of his Caltech peers, Rachel Ehrenberg reports. (They contend that they are working on implant devices for the injured bodies of people like Vietnam vets, says Griffith, but if you get them drunk they’ll confess that the real aim is to make cyborgs of us all.) Also, blogging from: Eva Emerson on some new results on longevity without caloric restriction in yeast; freelance Susan Gaidos on a Boston University medical statistician who has devoted lots of time to studying errors in the voting process, and says things can, and do, routinely go wrong; and Lisa Grossman on how mapping fossil fuel emissions may help scientists find where carbon is hiding in the biosphere.
- Health & Medicine
Let there be light
Researchers report restoring vision to people with a rare, genetic form of blindness. A different technique helped blind mice see again and could bring back some sight in people with macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa or other blinding diseases.
- Microbes
Team spirit
Working together, bacteria and other microbes can accomplish much more than they can alone. Now scientists hope to harness that ability by engineering their own microbial consortia.
- Ecosystems
Exxon Valdez: Tidal waters still troubled
From birds and clams to herring, many species continue to show persistent impacts of an oil spill that occurred two decades ago.
- Animals
Farm chemicals can indirectly hammer frogs
A widely used agricultural weed killer teams up with fertilizer to render frogs especially vulnerable to debilitating parasites.
- Earth
Some corals buffered from warming
Corals in the western Pacific have escaped bleaching linked to rising ocean temperatures.
- Ecosystems
Coastal dead zones expanding
The number of coastal areas known as dead zones is on the rise. A new tally reports more than 400 of the oxygen starved regions worldwide.
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New dating finds oldest coral yet
A sample of a black coral from a depth of 400 meters turns to be 4,200 years old.
