FINDING FAMILY DNA testing helped Michael Douglas find his biological family in southern Maryland and his Irish roots.
Matthew Rakola
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Magazine
In the June 23 SN: Emmy Noether gets her due, the 411 on ancestry testing, bonobo birthing buddies, a mysterious neutrino surplus, the oldest known lizard fossil, genetic genealogy in police work, Pluto’s dunes and more.
PLANETARY NURSERY This artist’s impression shows an infant planet as it swirls gas and dust around itself while orbiting a young star.
S. Dagnello, NRAO, AUI, NSF
THE BEAUTY OF SYMMETRY Emmy Noether had a lasting impact on her colleagues and students, and on the fields of mathematics and physics.
Sam Falconer
MELTDOWN An iceberg floats near the Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula. Melting ice from the Antarctic ice sheet, which includes the peninsula, has intensified, new research finds.
A. Shepherd/University of Leeds
Science News
News
Magnetic fields may be propping up the Pillars of Creation
Scientists made a map of the magnetic field within the Pillars of Creation, a star-forming area depicted in an iconic Hubble Space Telescope image.
50 Years Ago
In 1968, scientists thought they were close to detecting gravity waves
Despite an unverified discovery in 1968, spacetime ripples remained elusive for nearly 50 years.
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Science Stats
Leaf-cutter ants pick up the pace when they sense rain
Leaf-cutter ants struggle to carry wet leaves, so they run to avoid rain.
Feature
Special report: Genetic testing goes mainstream
Consumer genetic tests may not tell customers that much about themselves. Science News delves into these tests in a multipart series.
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The number of teens who report having sex is down
About 40 percent of high school students are having sex, the lowest amount in the last three decades.
Feature
DNA testing can bring families together, but gives mixed answers on ethnicity
DNA testing has become a new way for millions of Americans to expand their family trees and learn something about themselves, but results vary widely.
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Underwater fiber-optic cables could moonlight as earthquake sensors
The seafloor cables that ferry internet traffic across oceans may soon find another use: detecting underwater earthquakes.
Feature
In her short life, mathematician Emmy Noether changed the face of physics
A century after she published a groundbreaking mathematical theory, Emmy Noether gets her due.
News in Brief
Swirling gases reveal baby planets in a young star’s disk
A new technique pinpointed three planets forming around a young star about 330 light-years from Earth.
Introducing
These newfound frogs have been trapped in amber for 99 million years
Trapped in amber, 99-million-year-old frog fossils reveal the amphibians lived in a wet, tropical climate.
Experiences
What I actually learned about my family after trying 5 DNA ancestry tests
Ancestry results vary widely depending on which company you use.
News in Brief
The Mars rover Opportunity is sleeping, not dead, NASA says
Opportunity is hunkered down in a deep sleep on Mars to ride out what’s looking to be a long dark dust storm.
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Here’s what narwhals sound like underwater
Scientists eavesdropped while narwhals clicked and buzzed. The work could help pinpoint how the whales may react to more human noise in the Arctic.
News
Antarctica has lost about 3 trillion metric tons of ice since 1992
Antarctica’s rate of ice loss has sped up since 1992 — mostly in the last five years, raising global sea level by almost 8 millimeters on average.
News in Brief
This heavy element has a football-shaped atomic nucleus
Three nobelium isotopes have oblong nuclei, and some sport a ‘bubble’ center.
News
Sunshine is making Deepwater Horizon oil stick around
Sunlight created oxygen-rich oil by-products that are still hanging around eight years after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
News in Brief
A new AI can focus on one voice in a crowd
The artificial intelligence can ignore background noise in videos and focus on what a particular person is saying.
News
The sun shrinks a teensy bit when it’s feeling active
The radius of the sun gets slightly smaller during periods of high solar activity, researchers say.
News
Kids with food allergies are twice as likely to have autism
Children with food allergies are more likely to have autism than kids without, a study finds. But that doesn’t mean a child will develop the disorder.
News in Brief
If you thought the most recent flu season was bad, you were right
The recent U.S. flu season was classified as highly severe overall, the third time since 2003 that the seasonal outbreak has earned that designation.
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This theory suggests few workers were needed to cap Easter Island statues
A small workforce may have put huge stones on the heads of Easter Island statues.
News in Brief
Suicide rates have shot up in almost every U.S. state
Suicide rates increased sharply in nearly all 50 states from 1999 to 2016, according to a new government report.
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Bees join an exclusive crew of animals that get the concept of zero
Honeybees can pass a test of ranking ‘nothing’ as less than one.
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Why using genetic genealogy to solve crimes could pose problems
Rules governing how police can use DNA searches in genealogy databases aren’t clear, raising civil rights and privacy concerns.