All Stories
- Space
A little bit of gamma-ray music
BLOG: Art and science meld during a musical performance for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
- Earth
Nanoparticles’ indirect threat to DNA
Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.
- Space
Gamma-ray sources guide astronomers to pulsars
Gamma-ray emissions are providing a guide to finding the compact, rapidly rotating remnants of massive stars known as pulsars.
- Humans
Newborn babies may cry in their mother tongues
Days after birth, French and German infants wail to the melodic structure of their languages.
- Health & Medicine
Genome 10K: A new ark
Featured blog: Researchers are working to catalog the DNA sequences of just about every vertebrate genus.
- Space
Giant galaxy graveyard grows
The largest known galactic congregation is bigger than astronomers thought—and its inhabitants are all dead or dying.
- Health & Medicine
Vaccine may head off genital cancer in women
An experimental immunization can clear up premalignant growths caused by the human papillomavirus in some patients.
- Earth
Small earthquakes may not predict larger ones
Quakes far from tectonic plate boundaries may simply be aftershocks of ancient temblors.
- Animals
Textbook case of color-changing spider reopened
Female crab spiders switch colors to match flowers but may not fool their prey
- Climate
Kyoto climate treaty’s greenhouse ‘success’
There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).
- Space
Volcanic and ferric surprises on Mercury
Volcanic activity is more recent than expected, MESSENGER shows on its third flyby of the planet. Also, surface iron occurs as oxides.
- Space
New way to help avoid a space shuttle disaster
A new technique to make shuttle launches safer combines tricks from particle colliders, moon landings and vulture tracking.
