All Stories
- Earth
Operation Icewatch 2010 gears up
Climate experts turn their gaze north to monitor this summer's Arctic melt.
- Psychology
Travelers have southern bias
Southern routes to a destination often get picked over same-distance northern routes, possibly because people equate north with “up.”
- Physics
Bouncing beads outwit Feynman
Ratchet-and-pawl thought experiment whirs to life, extracting work from bouncing beads.
- Humans
BP spill: Gulf is primed to heal, but . . .
Every day, Mother Nature burps another 1,000 barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, along with additional quantities of natural gas. Normally, these hydrocarbons don’t stick around long because local bacteria have evolved to eat them about as fast as they appear. Which is potentially good news, she explained in testimony during a pair of June 9 House subcommittee events on Capitol Hill, because those bugs are now in place to begin chowing down on the oil and gas entering the Gulf from BP's damaged Deepwater Horizon well.
- Earth
Feds up estimates of BP-spill rate
At a news briefing on June 10, Marcia McNutt, who chairs the National Incident Command’s brain trust of experts calculating the likely release rate of the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill, pegged the best available estimates at between 20,000 and more than 40,000 barrels per day.
- Space
Familiar comets may have distant roots
More than 90 percent of objects found in the vast outer–solar system reservoir may have been born around other stars, new computer simulations suggest.
- Earth
Ancient marine reptiles losing their cool
Warm-bloodedness may help explain the creatures’ evolutionary success, a new study suggests.
- Space
Portrait of a youthful planet
New pictures confirm that astronomers have recorded a planet circling the star Beta Pictoris, making the orb the youngest, star-orbiting extrasolar planet to be photographed.
- Ecosystems
Parasite brood gets help from nearby microbes
A critical interaction between whipworm and E. coli suggests a new way to battle the common gut infection.
- Humans
Ancient shoe steps out of cave and into limelight
Excavations in an Armenian cave have uncovered the oldest known leather footwear, a 5,500-year-old shoe.
- Health & Medicine
What’s missing may be key to understanding genetics of autism
A large study of people with the developmental disorder reveals the importance of extremely rare variations in genes, making each case a bit different.
- Earth
Gulf gusher is far and away the biggest U.S. spill
As cleanup efforts progress, scientists try to track missing oil roaming below the surface.
