More Stories from the February 14, 2004 issue
-
Bacteria do the twist
A newly identified bacterial protein generates the sinuous shapes of some bacteria.
- Astronomy
Poof goes an atmosphere
Blasted by the heat and radiation from its parent star, a planet 150 light-years from Earth is literally blowing off its atmosphere.
-
Monkeys heed neural calls of the wild
A part of the brain that's involved in sound processing shows pronounced activity when rhesus monkeys hear their comrades vocalizing but not when the same animals hear other sounds.
- Health & Medicine
Virus might explain respiratory ailments
Human metapneumovirus, first isolated in 2001, is present in many respiratory infections that had previously gone unexplained.
- Animals
How blind mole rats find their way home
The blind mole rat is the first animal discovered to navigate by combining dead reckoning with a magnetic compass.
- Earth
Ancient whalers altered arctic lakes
Analyses of sediment and water samples taken from an arctic lake indicate that an ancient whaling community left a mark on the lake’s ecosystem that persists today, even though the settlement was abandoned more than 400 years ago.
- Anthropology
European find gets Stone Age date
A new radiocarbon analysis indicates that a skeleton found more than a century ago in an Italian cave dates to around 26,400 to 23,200 years ago.
-
Tailoring Therapies: Cloned human embryo provides stem cells
Scientists have for the first time carried test-tube cloning of a human embryo to the stage at which it can yield stem cells.
- Tech
Snappy DNA: Long strand folds into octahedron
By harnessing the self-assembling properties of DNA, researchers coerced a single strand of the genetic material to assume the shape of an octahedron.
- Paleontology
Early Flight? Winged insects appear surprisingly ancient
New analyses of a fossil suggest that winged insects may have emerged as early as 400 million years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Pregnancy Alert: Proteins may predict preeclampsia
Blood concentrations of two proteins that affect blood vessel growth appear to foretell the pregnancy condition known as preeclampsia.
- Anthropology
Some Primates’ Sheltered Lives: Baboons, chimps enter the realm of cave
In separate studies, researchers have gathered the first systematic evidence showing that baboons and chimpanzees regularly use caves, a behavior many anthropologists have attributed only to people and our direct ancestors.
- Animals
Flesh Eaters: Bees that strip carrion also take wasp young
A South American bee that ignores flowers and collects carrion from carcasses has an unexpected taste for live, abandoned wasp young.
- Physics
Candy Science: M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres
Squashed or stretched versions of spheres snuggle together more tightly than randomly packed spheres do.
- Animals
Where’d I Put That?
Birds that hide and recover thousands of separate caches of seeds have become a model for investigating how animals' minds work.
-
Code Breakers
Chemical tags applied to proteins that DNA wraps around regulate genetic activity.
- Tech
Diagnosing the Developing World
Researchers are learning how to adapt sophisticated technologies to meet the health-care needs of the developing world.
- Humans
Letters from the Feb. 14, 2004, issue of Science News
Revealing words “Bookish Math: Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries” (SN: 12/20&27/03, p. 392: Bookish Math) skipped one of the most significant methods for analyzing text for authorship. On March 11, 1887, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall reported in Science a straightforward method of plotting word length versus frequency. The beauty of this method is that […]
