Earth
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Health & Medicine
For a lucky few, ‘dioxins’ might be heart healthy
Dioxins and their kin are notorious poisons. They work by turning on what many biologists had long assumed was a vestigial receptor with no natural beneficial role. But it now appears that in a small proportion of people, this receptor may confer heart benefits.
By Janet Raloff -
Climate
National academies to review IPCC procedures
Global science organizations asked to help evaluate processes that produced 2007 climate report.
By Janet Raloff -
Climate
Ancient Norse colonies hit bad climate times
Temperatures in Iceland plummeted soon after settlers arrived, a new chemical analysis suggests.
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Earth
Green-ish pesticides bee-devil honey makers
Pesticides are agents designed to rid targeted portions of the human environment of undesirable critters – such as boll weevils, roaches or carpenter ants. They’re not supposed to harm beneficials. Like bees. Yet a new study from China finds that two widely used pyrethroid pesticides – chemicals that are rather “green” as bug killers go – can significantly impair the pollinators’ reproduction.
By Janet Raloff -
Earth
Country ants make it big in the city
Odorous house ants act like invading aliens when they discover urban living.
By Susan Milius -
Life
Mature females key to beluga sturgeon survival
Hatchery fish are unlikely to restore caviar-producing fish populations, a new assessment finds.
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Earth
Fowl surprise! Methylmercury improves hatching rate
A pinch of methylmercury is just ducky for mallard reproduction, according to a new federal study. The findings are counterintuitive, since methylmercury is ordinarily a potent neurotoxic pollutant.
By Janet Raloff -
Space
Geophysicists push age of Earth’s magnetic field back 250 million years
South African rocks suggest that the earliest stages of life on Earth were protected from harmful solar radiation.
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Earth
Arctic seafloor a big source of methane
Measurements show that Arctic undersea methane deposits, previously thought to be sealed by permafrost, are leaking into the atmosphere.
By Sid Perkins -
Earth
Earth knocked for a loop
Chile’s February 27 temblor, tectonically linked to another giant quake 50 years ago, sped up the Earth’s rotation and tipped the planet’s axis.
By Sid Perkins -
Chemistry
Plasticizers kept from leaching out
‘Chemicals of concern’ may be made safer in new materials.
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Agriculture
Frogs: Clues to how weed killer may feminize males
Atrazine, a widely used agricultural herbicide, not only can alter hormone levels in the developing frogs, but also perturb their physical development — and lead to an excess number of females, researchers report. Their new findings may help explain observations reported by a number of other research groups that at least in frogs, fairly low concentrations of atrazine can induce a feminization — or demasculinization.
By Janet Raloff