More Stories from the November 27, 2004 issue
- Chemistry
Cleaning up anthrax
Chemists have developed catalysts that spur common oxidants to quickly destroy germs, including deadly anthrax spores.
- Physics
Spinning Earth drags space
Slight deviations of two Earth-circling satellites from their expected orbits appear to confirm a curious prediction from Einstein's relativity theory.
- Earth
Lead’s a moving target at rifle ranges
The lead used in bullets and shotgun pellets can be a threat to the environment near rifle ranges but many of its hazards are manageable.
- Earth
Dead zones may record river floods
Microorganisms that live in seafloor sediments deposited beneath periodically anoxic waters near the mouths of rivers could chronicle the years when those rivers flooded for extended periods.
- Archaeology
Pompeii’s burial not its first disaster
Recent excavations reveal that the city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, experienced several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its demise.
- Health & Medicine
Umbilical Bounty: Cord blood shows value against leukemia
Umbilical cord blood transplants offer a viable treatment alternative for leukemia patients who don't have a matching bone marrow donor.
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Neural Feel for Seeing: Emotion may mold early visual activity in brain
The amygdala, an inner-brain structure that coordinates reactions to fearful sights, influences early stages of visual perception in far-removed brain regions.
- Animals
Color at Night: Geckos can distinguish hues by dim moonlight
The first vertebrate to ace tests of color vision at low light levels—tests that people flunk—is an African gecko.
- Earth
Damp sandcastles
What keeps the 500-meter-tall dunes of China's Badain Jaran desert immobile, despite arid, windy conditions, is a previously unknown source of groundwater.
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Seminal Discovery: Promiscuous females speed sperm evolution
A gene responsible for semen viscosity has evolved more rapidly in primate species with promiscuous females than in monogamous species.
- Materials Science
Transparent Transistor: See-through component for flexible displays
Transparent transistors deposited on flexible sheets of plastic could find their way into computer displays embedded in car windshields and other curved surfaces.
- Astronomy
Extrasolar Planet News: Superplanet or brown dwarf?
New observations of an oddball planetary system 150 light-years from Earth suggest that some planets either are superheavy, more than 17 times as massive as Jupiter, or that they form from disks of gas and dust that encircle not just a single star, but two starlike objects.
- Math
Con Artist: Scanning program can discern true art
A new mathematical tool distills painting style into an array of statistics as a potential means to spot forgeries.
- Health & Medicine
Asthma Counterattack
After several experimental attempts, researchers finally have verified that fighting allergens in the household can reduce symptoms of asthma.
- Paleontology
Flightless Feathered Friends
New finds of fossil penguins, as well as analyses of the characteristics and DNA of living penguins, are shedding light on the evolution of these flightless birds.
- Physics
Letters from the November 27, 2004, issue of Science News
Dark Secrets Astronomers and physicists seem to speak of black holes as though they took matter completely out of the universe (“Information, Please,” SN: 9/25/04, p. 202: Information, Please). An evaporating black hole would not fizz away into nothingness. It would lose energy and reappear in normal space as a very dense object (complete with […]
