All Stories
- Climate
Winter forecast: Sustained blizzard of climate news
At least in our area of the country, consumers are already being assaulted — well before Halloween — with Christmas music, decorations and holiday-themed goods. Reporters are smack in the throes of their own early seasonal blitz: News items carrying a climate or global-warming theme. And I don’t expect the crush of climate news and seminars to diminish until around Christmas. That’s when the next United Nations COP — or Conference of the Parties — will end this year’s pivotal round of negotiations in Copenhagen aimed at producing a new climate treaty.
- Animals
Junk food turns rats into addicts
Bacon, cheesecake and Ho Hos elicit addictive behavior in rats similar to the behavior of rats addicted to heroin.
- Earth
Johnstown Flood matched volume of Mississippi River
A modern survey of terrain determines flow rate of the 1889 flood that was one of America's deadliest disasters.
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More science for science writers
More dispatches from the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting, sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and held this year in Austin, Texas.
- Life
People can control their Halle Berry neurons
Researchers pinpoint individual brain cells that respond to particular people and objects.
- Particle Physics
Discovery of Higgs at Large Hadron Collider might not make all physicists happy
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests many would be horrified if all the LHC discovers is its prime target, the Higgs boson. Tom Siegfried and others blog from the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing in Austin, Texas.
- Anthropology
Droughts gave early humans survival skills for later travels
Droughts were actually good times for early humans, helping to develop skills for survival in other parts of the world, Lisa Grossman reports in a blog from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's New Horizons in Science meeting.
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Magic for neuroscientists
Magicians and neuroscientists may not seem like a likely match, but they have one important thing in common: A fascination with the brain, Science News reporter Laura Sanders reports in this blog filed from the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago. As Science News pointed out in an article about science and magic in April, neuroscientists delve deep into the human mind to see how things like attention, perception and memory work, while magicians manipulate these very same things to confound their audience. This unlikely alliance was solidified October 17 at the Society for Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting in Chicago as two world-class magicians demonstrated some of their tricks to an audience of thousands of neuroscientists.
- Agriculture
Report tallies hidden energy costs
The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don’t pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation's power grid.
- Health & Medicine
Exercise helps brains bounce back
Study of rhesus monkeys shows running protects dopamine neurons from death.
- Agriculture
Update: U.S. swine infected with swine flu
Well, it's official. Over the weekend, Agriculture Department scientists found evidence that at least one pig exhibited at this year's Minnesota state fair was infected with the pandemic H1N1 strain of swine flu.
- Space
SuperEarths common for other stars
A mother lode of 32 newly discovered planets brings the number of known extrasolar planets to more than 400 and suggests that lightweight planets are common around sunlike stars.
