Ordinarily in continuous motion, light pulses come to a dead stop in specially prepared atom clouds. (p. 52)

A team of paleontologists who dug up a new dinosaur recently chose to name their find after singer-songwriter Mark Knopfler, guitarist and cofounder of the rock group Dire Straits. (p. 52)

Analyses of the shock waves recorded at seismic stations across northern Europe indicate that the Russian submarine Kursk sank due to onboard explosions, not a run-in with another vessel. (p. 53)

Physiologists say they have demonstrated for the first time that dead xylem cells in plant plumbing can control water speed. (p. 53)

Two new studies add to the growing evidence that radiation treatment may keep arteries open longer after angioplasty. (p. 54)

A molecule called CHIP slates bad proteins for destruction and may lead to heart disease therapies. (p. 54)

A newly developed process encourages water droplets at the hydrophobic center of a wafer to speed outward to a water-friendly edge. (p. 55)

Two research teams have discovered the genetic mutation that causes familial dysautonomia, a lethal hereditary disease that causes nervous system damage. (p. 55)

A new book raises troubling and controversial issues regarding research on a famous South American Indian population. (p. 58)

On a tight energy budget, newborns no bigger than chipmunks grow into roly-poly superstars. (p. 61)

New images taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirm that a known pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star, was born in a supernova explosion that Chinese astronomers witnessed in 386 A.D. and call into question how astronomers traditionally compute the ages of pulsars. (p. 56)

Astronomers can’t explain the seemingly ephemeral nature of bright clouds seen on the northernmost sunlit edge of Uranus. (p. 56)

The famous Mesopotamian clay tablet known as Plimpton 322 represents an ordered list of worked examples that a teacher would use to prepare a sequence of closely related questions about squares and reciprocals for student exercises. (p. 56)

Even with perfect play over a long time, unfavorable odds and limits on how much a gambler may win per machine make playing video poker into a losing game. (p. 56)

By making the densest, hottest matter ever in a lab, smashups between fast-moving nuclei in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are coming closer than ever to reproducing the superhot, primordial fluid that presumably filled the universe immediately after the Big Bang. (p. 63)

Researchers in Japan have made a material whose inherent magnetism can be turned off and on electrically, as long as the material, a novel semiconductor, stays ultracold. (p. 63)