More Stories from the April 1, 2006 issue
- Animals
Hairy crab lounges deep in the Pacific
A newly discovered deep-sea creature has the body of a crab, but with long, fluffy, blonde hair covering its legs.
- Health & Medicine
On a dare, teen advances medical science
A 16-year-old daredevil inadvertently demonstrated the incubation period of a common roundworm after she swallowed an earthworm that harbored larvae of the parasite.
- Tech
Device rids homes of sounds of rap
Woodpeckers cause millions of dollars of damage to homes and buildings each year, but a battery-operated, sound-activated, spider-shaped device installed beneath a home's eaves can help prevent this avian scourge.
- Animals
Wary male spiders woo lifelessly
When trying to court a cannibalistic female spider, males of a certain species play dead.
- Earth
Shafts of snow sculpted by sun
Physicists have created miniature, laboratory versions of towering snow spikes found high in the Andes Mountains.
- Physics
Tiny wires trigger electric reversal
Ultrathin zinc nanowires exhibit a puzzling conductivity reversal that flies in the face of known wire behavior.
- Tech
Corralling Brownian motion
A new microscope system uses electrically controlled fluid motions to counteract Brownian motion, preventing those random jitters from driving proteins, viruses, and other tiny objects out of the field of view.
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Smarty Brains: High-IQ kids navigate notable neural shifts
Children with extremely high IQ scores display a distinctive pattern of brain development, characterized by dramatic thickening and then by marked thinning of brain tissue.
- Health & Medicine
XXL from Too Few Zs? Skimping on sleep might cause obesity, diabetes
Widespread sleep deprivation could partly explain the current epidemics of both obesity and diabetes.
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Pigging Out Healthfully: Engineered pork has more omega-3s
Scientists have created pigs that sport much higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids in their tissues than normal pigs do.
- Tech
Cool Wire: Nanostructure boosts superconductor
The extraordinary performance of a prototype superconductive wire is encouraging superconductivity specialists, even though the prototype is unlikely to be mass-produced.
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Awake and Learning: Memory storage begins before bedtime
Although a good night's sleep aids memory storage, learning isn't a task that just happens overnight.
- Earth
Coral Clues: Rise and fall of reefs record quakes’ effects
Shallow coral reefs around islands west of Sumatra chronicled the uplift and subsidence that resulted from the massive quakes that struck that region in 2004 and 2005.
- Planetary Science
Propelling Evidence: Cassini finds clues to source of Saturn’s rings
Four propeller-shaped gaps in one of Saturn's main rings are the latest evidence that a shattered moon produced the planet's dazzling hoops.
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Thugs and Bugs
With some laboratory detective work, scientists are discovering how various pathogens interact with their targets.
- Earth
Uncharted Territory
Ultraslow-spreading undersea ridges are giving oceanographers fresh insights into how Earth's crust forms.
- Humans
Letters from the April 1, 2006, issue of Science News
The prion game I must quibble about the headline of the piece about chronic wasting disease in deer (“Hunter Beware: Infectious proteins found in deer muscle,” SN: 1/28/06, p. 52). “Hunter Beware” sounds ominous, but in order to get the mice to exhibit symptoms after getting muscle tissue from infected deer, it was necessary to […]
