All Stories

  1. Tech

    Novel sensing system catches the dud spud

    A new device can detect a single potato that's infected with bacterial soft rot while buried deep in a storage crate with hundreds of healthy tubers.

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  2. Animals

    Really big guys restrain youth violence

    Importing six full-grown bull elephants into a park of youngsters stopped killing sprees by young males.

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  3. Low-cal diet may reduce cancer in monkeys

    Researchers monitoring monkeys have seen signs that slashing normal calorie consumption can benefit long-lived primates by extending natural life spans and reducing the odds of suffering diseases such as cancer.

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  4. Materials Science

    To make bronze, tin flakes do a wild dance

    Upsetting some prevailing ideas about how alloys form, rafts of tin atoms jitterbug madly around on a pure copper surface and leave spots of bronze in their wakes.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Sputum Test May Predict Lung Cancer

    By zeroing in on aberrations in two cancer-fighting genes, researchers have found a marker for cancer risk that could help doctors screen people for signs of lung cancer early enough for treatment to be effective.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Old-fashioned circumcision can spread herpes

    Boys whose ritual circumcisions involve an ancient, and now rare, practice may acquire herpes during the operation.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Severe sweating treated with Botox

    A new treatment has been approved for excessive sweating, or hyperhidrosis, which is surprisingly common.

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  8. Humans

    Letters from the August 14, 2004, issue of Science News

    It’s a groove thing I don’t want to downplay genuine discovery, but your story about optically reading old records left me a little underwhelmed (“Groovy Pictures: Extracting sound from images of old audio recordings,” SN: 5/29/04, p. 339: Groovy Pictures: Extracting sound from images of old audio recordings). The optical playing of records has been […]

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  9. Health & Medicine

    What’s the Beef?

    Beef certified as Angus may not always be as tender as consumers expect.

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  10. Mechanism suggested for Guam illness

    A research team has invoked protein chemistry to propose a solution to a long-standing neuroscience mystery in Guam.

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  11. Planetary Science

    The sound of rings

    When Cassini reached Saturn on June 30, it twice dashed through a gap in the planet's rings, and onboard science instruments recorded a flurry of ring dust harmlessly striking the spacecraft.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    HIV drugs may stop cervical disease

    A drug combination given to people with HIV, the AIDS virus, helps knock out precancerous cervical lesions in some women.

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