All Stories
- Animals
How blind mole rats find their way home
The blind mole rat is the first animal discovered to navigate by combining dead reckoning with a magnetic compass.
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Your article refers to a virus as a “microbe.” I think of a virus more as a seed or spore. What definition is Science News using for the word? Neil MurphyWalnut Creek, Calif. Medical dictionaries differ in defining viruses as microbes . Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Eleventh Edition ( 2003, Merriam-Webster ) says that viruses are […]
- Health & Medicine
Virus might explain respiratory ailments
Human metapneumovirus, first isolated in 2001, is present in many respiratory infections that had previously gone unexplained.
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Monkeys heed neural calls of the wild
A part of the brain that's involved in sound processing shows pronounced activity when rhesus monkeys hear their comrades vocalizing but not when the same animals hear other sounds.
- Astronomy
Poof goes an atmosphere
Blasted by the heat and radiation from its parent star, a planet 150 light-years from Earth is literally blowing off its atmosphere.
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Bacteria do the twist
A newly identified bacterial protein generates the sinuous shapes of some bacteria.
- Tech
Diagnosing the Developing World
Researchers are learning how to adapt sophisticated technologies to meet the health-care needs of the developing world.
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Code Breakers
Chemical tags applied to proteins that DNA wraps around regulate genetic activity.
- Animals
Where’d I Put That?
Birds that hide and recover thousands of separate caches of seeds have become a model for investigating how animals' minds work.
- Math
Turning a Snowball Inside Out
Turning a sphere inside out without allowing any sharp creases along the way is a tricky mathematical maneuver. Carving an intricate snow sculpture depicting a crucial step in this twisty transformation presents its own difficulties. This was the challenge facing a team led by mathematician Stan Wagon of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., last […]
- Health & Medicine
Calcium Superchargers
Foods such as yogurts supplemented with fiberlike sugars are developing into the latest wave in functional foods–commercial goods seeded with ingredients that boost their nutritiousness or healthfulness. Makers of foods doctored with these unusual, nearly flavorless sugars claim that their products improve the body’s absorption of calcium in the diet, thereby offering bones a treat. […]
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From the February 3, 1934, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> SHORT-WAVE PHONE SYSTEM SERVES BRIDGE BUILDERS Curiously, radio is helping to build a bridge. Special short-wave transmitting and receiving sets make possible communication among groups of contractors scattered on land and water along the eight-and-one-quarter-mile route of work on the San Francisco-Oakland bridge. These men on the job also talk […]
