763 results
- Space
Star outweighed any known in Milky Way
A nearby supernova was a big blast, challenging theories of how massive stars live and die.
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Sequencing the dead to save the living
Reviving ancient genomes of long-extinct creatures offers a window into past extinctions—and may help prevent future die outs.
- Ecosystems
Greening Christmas
I love the smell of balsam and firs and decorating holiday cookies – preferably with the sound of popular holiday standards in the background. I even enjoy shopping for and wrapping carefully chosen presents in seasonal papers festooned with huge bows. So when my hosts, this week, asked what I wanted to see during my visit, the answer was simple. Take me to one of Germany’s famed Christmas markets. And literally within a couple hours of my plane’s landing, they were already ushering me into the first of what would be a handful of such seasonal fairs. But as I also quickly learned, this first was an unusual one: a "green" bazaar.
- Archaeology
Stone Age figurine has contentious origins
A new study suggests that an ivory female figurine from Germany dates to at least 35,000 years ago, but that conclusion has sparked debate over the Stone Age origins of figurative art.
- Life
Life: Science news of the year, 2008
Science News writers and editors looked back at the past year's stories and selected a handful as the year's most interesting and important in Life. Follow hotlinks to the full, original stories.
- Life
Reviving extinct DNA
For the first time, scientists have resurrected a piece of DNA from an extinct animal — the Tasmanian tiger. The researchers engineered mice with a piece of the long-gone marsupial's DNA that turns on a collagen gene in cartilage-producing cells.
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On the Fringe
Astronomers look to the Kuiper belt for clues to the solar system’s history.
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19914
Your article suggested yet a second possibility leading to the decline or extinction of the mammoths in the region of the apparent iron micrometeorite-shower impact, which drove the metallic particles into the sides of the fossil tusks examined. That same shower of high-velocity metallic particles found in the tusks probably perforated the skin and soft […]
- Humans
Letters from the February 16, 2008, issue of Science News
Inert placebo? Regarding “Getting the Red Out” (SN: 1/19/08, p. 35): While drug companies wish to market their products, my attention is drawn to the fact that 1 in 8 of the control group of psoriasis patients was cured by placebo effect. Who will investigate the process therein? Is there a market for it? Carson […]
- Paleontology
Unexpected Archive: Mammoth hair yields ancient DNA
Hair from ancient mammoths contains enough genetic material to permit reconstruction of parts of the animal's genome.
- Paleontology
Struck from above
Evidence of an extraterrestrial object striking Earth at the height of the last ice age comes from micrometeorites embedded in the tusks of creatures that were grazing the Alaskan tundra when the object burst in the air above.
- Space
Final Hubble repair mission begins
The final mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope lifted off May 11.
