A 3.5-million-year-old skull found in Kenya represents a group of species in the human evolutionary family that evolved separately from australopithecines such as Lucy's kind in Ethiopia. (p. 180)

Researchers have made a device that can differentiate nearly identical DNA molecules, which might lead to sequencing at unprecedented speeds. (p. 180)

Men who were born of mothers who had the pregnancy complication preeclampsia are roughly twice as likely to father a child through preeclamptic pregnancy than are men who were born of mothers who had a normal pregnancy. (p. 181)

Scuffs, scrapes, and gouges found atop undersea plateaus and ridges in the Arctic Ocean suggest that kilometer-thick ice shelves covered much of the ocean there during some previous ice ages. (p. 181)

A new study adds to the evidence that astronomers have unveiled some of the dark matter in our galaxy and that it's pretty ordinary stuff—white dwarfs, the cold, compact embers of low-mass stars. (p. 182)

An international team of researchers has identified a protein that helps compounds in some vegetables prevent cancer. (p. 182)

Although it's now the fifth element to be made into the strange state of ultracold matter known as Bose-Einstein condensate, helium may prove to be the most revealing so far because of unusually high energies within the newly condensed atoms. (p. 183)

It's time to stop assuming that standard gender differences in birds come from males getting bigger rather than from females getting smaller. (p. 183)

A new study adds to the evidence that past volcanic activity could have temporarily created a warmer, wetter Mars, a place on which water once flowed freely. (p. 184)

Human embryonic stem cells transplanted into the brains of people with Parkinson's disease survive and grow better in patients under 60 years of age than in older patients. (p. 184)

Fatty plaques that form on the inside of blood vessels are less stable and hence more prone to rupture than are hard, calcified plaques. (p. 184)

Innovative curricula are moving science education away from a reliance on textbooks. (p. 186)

There's a whole world of animal communication by vibration that researchers are now exploring. (p. 190)

Researchers isolated markers of a cigarette-generated carcinogen in urine of nonsmoking women married to smokers. (p. 189)

The combustion chemistry of heavy-duty diesel trucks changes with altitude. (p. 189)

The Asian mountain range that includes some of the tallest peaks in the world turns out to be about 15 million years younger than geologists previously thought. (p. 189)

Evidence from 65-million-year-old sediments suggests that a single impact from space wiped out the dinosaurs and that ecosystems recovered from the trauma in only a few thousand years. (p. 189)