Chemistry
A chemistry card game forges bonds
A new card game lets players brush up on chemistry by making compounds out of ions. Form some bonds and have fun in the process.
Reviews & Previews
Science Visualized
Life
Male stag beetles face weighty problem for flight
Male stag beetles need enormous mandibles to fend off other males and find a mate, but computer simulations show that the giant jaws make running and flying very difficult.
Notebook
Planetary Science
A modest Plutonian proposal
Flagstaff, Echidna, Spock. Naming conventions for the landscapes of Pluto and its moons are proposed ahead of the arrival of the New Horizons probe.
Features
-
Typical American diet can damage immune system
The typical American diet sends our good and bad gut microbes out of balance and can lead to inflammation and a host of problems.
-
How to rewire the eye
The cutting-edge technology called optogenetics may offer a workaround to partially restore vision even after the retina’s light-sensing rods and cones die.
More Stories from the May 30, 2015 issue
- Health & Medicine
Why cancer patients waste away
A tumor-produced protein that interferes with insulin causes wasting in fruit flies with cancer.
- Anthropology
Ritual cannibalism occurred in England 14,700 years ago
Human bones show signs of ritual cannibalism in England 14,700 years ago.
- Paleontology
‘Frankenstein’ dinosaur was a mash-up of meat eater and plant eater
Fossils of a bizarre-looking dinosaur found in Chile are challenging ideas about how dinosaurs adapted to their environments.
- Ecosystems
Just 1 percent of Amazon’s trees hold half of its carbon
Roughly 1 percent of tree species in the Amazon rainforest account for half of the jungle’s carbon storage.
- Psychology
Childhood bullying leads to long-term mental health problems
U.S., British data raise bullying’s profile as a long-term mental health hazard for kids.
- Astronomy
Tiny explosions add up to heat corona
Millions of mini-explosions every second on the sun could solve the riddle of why the sun’s atmosphere is so much warmer than its surface.
- Earth
Cosmic rays illuminate lightning
Radio waves emitted by particles zipping through thunderstorms allow physicists to probe thunderclouds and, perhaps eventually, learn what triggers lightning strikes.
- Paleontology
This dinosaur’s ride may have been a glide
A new dino called Yi qi may have taken to the skies with wings akin to those of pterosaurs and flying squirrels.
- Genetics
DNA disorganization linked to aging
Changes in the way that DNA is tightly packed in cells leads to mayhem that promotes the aging process.
- Neuroscience
Zipping to Mars could badly zap brain nerve cells
Charged particles like the ones astronauts might encounter wallop the brain, mouse study suggests.
- Physics
Scientists take first picture of thunder
Scientists precisely capture thunder sound waves radiating from artificially triggered lightning.
- Microbes
Possible nearest living relatives to complex life found in seafloor mud
New phylum of sea-bottom archaea microbes could be closest living relatives yet found to the eukaryote domain of complex life that includes people.
- Genetics
Editing human germline cells sparks ethics debate
Human gene editing experiments raise scientific and societal questions.
- Chemistry
Bacteria staining method has long been misexplained
New research upends what scientists know about a classic lab technique, called gram staining, used for more than a century to characterized and classify bacteria.
- Health & Medicine
Kids who have had measles are at higher risk of fatal infections
Measles infection leaves kids vulnerable to other infectious diseases for much longer than scientists suspected.
- Climate
Rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide rise unprecedented
The current rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is unprecedented over at least the last 66 million years, new research shows.
- Quantum Physics
Quantum experiment dissects wave-particle mash-up
A modified version of a landmark quantum physics experiment has shown that a single parcel of light can be a particle and a wave simultaneously.
- Animals
Vampire squid take mommy breaks
The vampire squid again defies its sensationalist name with a life in the slow lane.
- Plants
The art and science of the hedgerow
Spiky hawthorn trees have found many uses despite their unforgiving nature, Bill Vaughn writes in ‘Hawthorn.’
- Science & Society
Histories left behind by the dispossessed
‘Dispatches from Dystopia’ chronicles adventures in modernist wastelands to recount tales of the invisible and the overlooked, the exiled and the dispossessed.
- Animals
Early research asked whether cats dream
Early research asked whether cats dream; researchers still don’t know definitively.
