All Stories
- Life
Trees worldwide a sip away from dehydration
Plumbing systems operate on a razor’s edge, making even moist forests highly vulnerable to drought.
- Space
Glimpse at early universe finds expansion slowdown
BOSS project looks at acceleration rate before dark energy hit the gas.
- Life
Chromosome ends hold clues to a bird’s longevity
Short telomeres are tied to higher mortality in Indian Ocean warblers.
- Earth
Mexican silver made it into English coins
Chemical tests of currency help reveal where New World riches flowed.
- Psychology
Highlights from the Psychonomic Society annual meeting
Summaries from the conference held November 15-18 in Minneapolis.
- Psychology
Word-detecting baboons are a tough read
New models offer contrasting views of monkeys’ ability to identify frequently seen letter pairs.
- Tech
Printed robot moves with a beat
Tiny device created with a 3-D printer employs heart cells to make it move.
- Earth
Gulf spill harmed small fish, studies indicate
Effects vary but dire impacts seen with some very low exposures.
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- Health & Medicine
Protein’s destructive journey in brain may cause Parkinson’s
Clumps of alpha-synuclein move through dopamine-producing cells, mouse study finds.
- Tech
Building robots that slither
Howie Choset is a roboticist, but his team’s creations bear little resemblance to C-3PO or R2-D2. Instead, Choset finds inspiration in nature — specifically, snakes.
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Letters
To spot a planet “Planetary peekaboo” (SN: 9/22/12, p. 26) says that to hunt for faraway planets, the Kepler spacecraft “watches for blinks occurring when a planet dims a star’s light by passing in front of it.” For a star to dim when a planet moves in front of it requires us to be in […]
