More Stories from the December 15, 2007 issue
- Health & Medicine
Big kids at risk for heart disease
Overweight children grow up to have an elevated risk for blocked coronary arteries as adults, a long-term Danish study finds.
- Animals
Female antelopes take the lead in courtship
Topi antelopes, with their hesitant males, reverse the usual sex roles in mammal courtship.
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Cell’s core pore structure solved
Scientists working in yeast have deciphered the structure of the complex cluster of proteins that regulates access to the nucleus of cells.
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Escaping flatland
Growing cells in gelatinous materials gains in popularity as more researchers realize how the three-dimensional arrangement of cells influences cell behavior—and increases the relevance of experiments.
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Cells’ innards may share origin
Many of the internal structures of a cell may have evolved from an ancient, simpler compartment.
- Anthropology
Ancient Ailment? Early human may have carried tuberculosis
A 500,000-year-old Homo erectus skull from Turkey may show telltale signs of tuberculosis, by far the earliest such evidence of the disease.
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- Animals
Hatch a Thief: Brains incline birds toward a life of crime
When it comes to a bird family's propensity to pilfer, a larger than usual brain for a particular body size is more important than body size alone.
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Pulling Together: Mitotic ring self-assembly revealed
A ring of proteins forms around the "waistlines" of cells to contract and split the cells in two, and scientists have now discovered how that ring self-assembles.
- Astronomy
Stellar Opposites: Sky survey reveals new halo of stars
The Milky Way galaxy possesses a distinct outer halo that orbits in the opposite direction from its inner halo and the rest of the galaxy.
- Astronomy
Run of the Mill: Finding galactic building blocks in early universe
Astronomers have discovered 27 faint, run-of-the-mill galaxies from the early universe that may be some of the building blocks of giant galaxies such as the Milky Way.
- Physics
Light Swell: Optical rogue waves resemble oceanic ones
Signals in optical fibers can combine into rare, short-lived spikes that resemble oceanic rogue waves.
- Ecosystems
Prairie Revival
Prairie restoration is attracting interest, but because so little long-term monitoring and comparative studies have been done, researchers are still wondering whether it's really possible to re-create a prairie.
- Health & Medicine
The Long Road to Beta Cells
In their quest to cure type 1 diabetes, scientists are finding that turning stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells is a lot harder than it first appeared.
- Humans
Letters from the December 15, 2007, issue of Science News
Fuzzy logic Astronomer Masanori Iye of the National Observatory of Japan blames the blurry appearance of meteor trails at about 100 kilometers altitude on the fact that they were photographed with telescopes focused at infinity (“Out-of-focus find,” SN: 9/29/07, p. 205). But optics teaches that any object much farther away than the focal length of […]
