A compound that disrupts a bacterium's internal signal pathways provides a novel type of antibiotic action.

A new analysis of fossil and modern skulls, focusing on the size of a bony passage for a nerve that controls the tongue, suggests that human ancestors used spoken language as long as 400,000 years ago.

Major current patterns in the deep ocean can shift more quickly than climate researchers have long presumed.

A decrease in canine distemper among vaccinated city raccoons did not trigger growth of their population.

Some people seem to be genetically predisposed to take advantage of the anti-clotting properties of aspirin, which reduce the risk of having a heart attack.

Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, has given birth to a lamb named Bonnie.

A combination of text and link analysis underlies a novel method for automatically generating lists of authoritative Web resources.

An orbiting observatory has found a dozen giant tornadoes in the solar atmosphere and evidence that the sun’s core may be cooler than expected.

Intense infrared light provides some of the first images of the chemical components of intact, living cells.

Research Notes

Biology

Formosan termites are insensitive to the naphthalene that they build into their tunnel walls.

Bee researchers speculate that a relatively small number of genes gives killer bees their stinging ferocity.

Biomedicine

Recipients of corporate gifts acknowledge that donors typically expected something substantial in return.

Drugs that starve fast-dividing, malignant cells can stop a tumor's spread.

Computers

As an alternative to encryption, confidential information can be broken into segments that are tagged and inserted into a larger document.

No single seach engine indexes more than about one-third of the more than 320 million pages on the World Wide Web.

Biomedicine

Certain dietary antioxidants, such as beta carotene and selenium, appear to protect lung health.

Animal studies suggest that a hot environment may crank up defective internal thermostats in the elderly to fight infections.

Physics

Even when observed on a small scale, a deuteron's structure is adequately described as a loose pairing of a proton and a neutron rather than as an assemblage of six quarks.

The unstable nucleus californium-252 can spontaneously split into two pieces without emitting neutrons.

Antiproton probes show that more neutrons than protons sit at the fringes of certain atomic nuclei.

Long ago and far away

Resurrecting an old search method and relying on the two largest visible light and near-infrared telescopes, astronomers are detecting a slew of the most distant galaxies.

Researchers weigh in on body size

Although obesity appears to contribute proportionately less to the death rate as people age from 30 to 74 years old, the number of deaths attributed to excess weight goes up after age 30.