Ice's Watery Surface Comes Into View

Images of the surface of ice may help explain its slipperiness as well as its role in atmospheric ozone depletion.

Spacecraft spies hills and valleys of sun

A fixed landscape of gassy hills and valleys rotates with the surface of the sun.

Galileo probes structure of Jovian moons

Images and gravitational and magnetic field maps from the Galileo spacecraft are describing four Jovian large moons from the inside out.

Tumor offers unsafe home for cell's genes

The oxygen-poor conditions inside a tumor cause further mutations in cancer cells, perhaps making the tumor more deadly.

Earthquakes: the deadly side of geometry

A seismologist uses foam rubber models and computers to explain why some earthquakes cause much more damage than others.

Can selenium ward off deadly cancers?

A group of volunteers who took daily supplements of selenium for more than 4 years did not reduce their rates of skin cancer as predicted, but they did develop fewer lung, colon, rectum, and prostate cancers than a group that took a placebo.

Reaching 1 trillion calculations per second

An ultracomputer assembled by Intel for the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship program achieved a record calculation rate of 1 trillion operations per second.

Missing DNA offers manic depression hints

A deleted DNA segment responsible for a condition known as velo-cardio-facial syndrome may hold a gene whose absence predisposes people to manic depression.

Research Notes:

Agriculture:

Making genes disappear . . .

A new technique rids plants of foreign genes, added by genetic engineering, after they have served their purpose.

. . . and virus-resistance genes appear

Researchers are engineering plants to resist multiple viruses.

Astronomy:

More evidence of ice on the moon

Radar signals bounced off the lunar surface indicate that the moon contains a substantial supply of water ice in a heavily shadowed basin.

Huge pulsars boosted by tiny neutrinos?

Pulsars travel so far and so fast because they were blasted out of their original location by neutrinos created at the birth of the star.

Behavior:

Depression puffs up lung cancer. . .

Men who experience moderate to severe depression face an increased risk of developing lung cancer, either because of the mood disorder's direct biological effects or its tendency to promote heavy cigarette smoking.

. . .and may lay heavy on the heart

Major depression, as well as a milder mood disorder, substantially boosts the likelihood of suffering a heart attack.

Earth Science:

Spying on a deep-sea eruption

When an undersea volcanic ridge erupted off the Pacific Northwest coast, oceanographers got a glimpse of the process of seafloor spreading.

A nuclear waste experiment at sea?

A sunken submarine in the Atlantic may be the ideal place to test whether seafloor sediments make a suitable resting place for nuclear waste.

Articles:

Animals' Fancies

Why members of some species prefer their own sex

Members of many animal species engage in homosexual activities. Researchers have argued that such relations, either directly or indirectly, ensure that the participants' genes get passed along. But research into the behavior of rams and macaques suggest otherwise. Studies are also demonstrating biological and environmental differences that may account for animals' sexual preferences.

Ancient Roads to Europe

African ancestors may have entered Europe surprisingly early

Archaeological discoveries in Spain and elsewhere have raised the possibility that human ancestors entered Europe at least 1 million years ago, and perhaps much earlier.

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