More Stories from the July 6, 2002 issue
- Health & Medicine
Appetite-suppressing drug burns fat, too
An experimental drug seems to assail obesity through dual biological actions.
- Materials Science
Spring in your step? The forces in cartilage
Researchers are uncovering the role of molecular forces in cartilage's ability to resist compression.
-
Caregivers take heartfelt hit
Older persons experience elevated systolic blood pressure for at least 1 year after a spouse with Alzheimer's disease enters a nursing-care facility or dies.
- Agriculture
Killer bees boost coffee yields
Even self-pollinating coffee plants benefit substantially from visits by insect pollinators.
- Physics
Twice-charmed particles spotted?
Exotic cousins of protons and neutrons known as doubly-charmed baryons may have made their laboratory debut.
- Health & Medicine
Hunger hormone gone awry?
People with an inherited form of obesity caused by constant hunger pangs have higher-than-normal blood concentrations of ghrelin, a hormone believed to boost appetite.
- Health & Medicine
Sex, smell and appetite
A study of sexual dysfunction in mutated mice may help explain the connection between smell and appetite.
- Materials Science
X Rays to Go: Carbon nanotubes could shrink machines
A new type of X-ray machine operates at room temperature by producing X-ray-generating electrons with carbon nanotubes instead of traditional heated metal filaments.
- Earth
Teenage Holdup: Pollution may delay puberty
A new study of adolescents suggests that widespread environmental pollutants such as PCBs and dioxins may delay sexual development.
- Physics
Heightened Resistance: Sharper shaft points to smaller bits
Scientists have exploited a method for detecting the orientations of magnetic fields to achieve a remarkable leap in detector sensitivity.
- Health & Medicine
His-and-Her Hunger Pangs: Gender affects the brain’s response to food
Men's and women's brains react differently to hunger, as well as to satiation.
-
The Eyes Have It: Newborns prefer faces with a direct gaze
Only a few days after birth, babies already home in on faces that fix them with a direct gaze and devote less attention to faces with eyes that look to one side.
- Paleontology
Into the Gap: Fossil find stands on its own four legs
A fossil originally misidentified as an ancient fish turns out to be the nearly intact remains of a four-limbed creature that lived during an extended period noted for its lack of fossils of land animals.
- Humans
Official Concern: U.N. weighs in on acrylamide toxicity
A United Nations panel concluded that, in fried, grilled, and baked foods, the formation of acrylamide, a carcinogen and nerve poison in rodents, constitutes "a serious problem."
-
Tough Tradeoff: Beetle brains show how sex shortens life
Brain surgery in beetles reveals yet another way that having sex can shorten life.
-
Aphids with Attitude
A few aphid species that live socially in groups raise their own armies of teenage female clones.
- Physics
Double or Nothing
The hunt for a rare, hypothetical nuclear transformation known as neutrinoless double-beta decay may answer one of the most urgent questions in physics today: How much do elementary particles called neutrinos weigh?
