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

Sources:  

James A. Hoch
The Scripps Research Institute
Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine
10550 North Torrey Pines Road, NX-1
La Jolla, CA 92037

Thomas J. Silhavy
Princeton University
Department of Molecular Biology
Lewis-Thomas Laboratory
Princeton, NJ 08544

 

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.

Sources: 

Richard F. Kay
Duke University Medical Center
Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy
Box 3170
Durham, NC 27710

 

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

Sources: 

Jess F. Adkins
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Geochemistry 62
Route 9W
Palisades, NY 10964

Michael J. Risk
McMaster University
Department of Geology
Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4M1
Canada

 

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

Sources:  

Thomas D. Nudds
University of Guelph
Department of Zoology
Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1
Canada

Elizabeth S. Williams
University of Wyoming
Department of Veterinary Sciences
1174 Snowy Range Road
Laramie, WY 82070

 

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.

Sources:  

Paul F. Bray
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Division of Hematology
720 Rutland Avenue
Ross Research Building
Room 1015
Baltimore, MD 21205-2196

James J. Ferguson
Texas heart Institute
MC 3-117
P.O. Box 20345
Houston, TX 77225-0345

Pascal J. Goldschmidt
Ohio State University
Heart and Lung Institute
514 MRF
420 West 12th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210

 

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

Sources: 

Richard Cripps
Hayhurst Connington Crips
Fry’s Yard
39-40 Bridge Street
Godalming, Surrey GU7 1HP
United Kingdom

Claire Gale
Hayhurst Connington Crips
Fry’s Yard
39-40 Bridge Street
Godalming, Surrey GU7 1HP
United Kingdom

 

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

Sources: 

Jon Kleinberg
Department of Computer Science
Upson Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
Web site: http://simon.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/.

Prabhakar Raghavan
IBM Almaden Research Center
K53/B2
650 Harry Road
San Jose, CA 95120

 

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.

Sources: 

Douglas Gough
University of Cambridge
Institute of Astronomy
Madingley Road
Cambridge CB3 OHA
United Kingdom

Helen E. Mason
University of Cambridge
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
Silver Street
Cambridge CB3 9EW
United Kingdom

C. David Pike
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Chilton, Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom

 

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

Sources: 

Research Notes

Biology

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

Sources:  

Jian Chen
Louisiana State University
Department of Entomology
Agricultural Center
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

 

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

Sources: 

Greg J. Hunt
Purdue University
Department of Entomology
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1132

 

Biomedicine

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

Sources: 

Eric G. Campbell
Massachusetts General Hospital
Health Policy Research and Development Unit
Medical Practices Evaluation Center
50 Staniford Street, 9th Floor
Boston, MA 02114

 

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

Sources:  

Éric Dupont
Los Laboratories Æterna Inc.
456 Marconi Street
Sainte-Foy, Quebec G1N 4A8
Canada

B. Kim Lee Sim
EntreMed, Inc.
9610 Medical Center Drive
Suite 200
Rockville, MD 20850

Computers

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

Sources: 

Ronald L. Rivest
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
545 Technology Square
Room 324
Cambridge, MA 02139

 

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

Sources: 

Steve Lawrence
NEC Research Institute
4 Independence Way
Princeton, NJ 08540

 

Biomedicine

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

Sources: 

Patricia A. Cassano
Cornell University
Department of Epidemiology
Savage Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853

Guizhou Hu
Cornell University
Department of Epidemiology
Savage Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853

 

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

Sources: 

Maria Florez-Duquet
University of Delaware
Neuroscience Program
Wolf Hall
Newark, DE 19716
E-mail: mflorezd@udel.edu

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.

Sources: 

Abdellah Ahmidouch
Department of Physics
North Carolina A&T State University
Greensboro, NC 27411

Elizabeth Beise
Department of Physics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-4111

 

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

Sources: 

A.V. Ramayya
Department of Physics
Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1807, Station B
Nashville, TN 37235

 

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

Sources: 

F. Joachim Hartmann
Physics Department
Technical University of Munich
James Franck Strasse
85748 Garching
Germany

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.

Sources:  

Mark Dickinson
Johns Hopkins University
Space Telescope Science Institute
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Charles and 34th Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

Richard G. McMahon
University of Cambridge
Institute of Astronomy
Madingley Road
Cambridge CB3 0HA
England

 

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.

Sources: