All Stories

  1. Materials Science

    Tiny Labs: Polymers on silicon chip catch, release proteins

    In a step toward a new laboratory-on-a-chip technology, researchers have grown a dense polymer film on a silicon wafer that takes up and releases proteins on command.

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  2. Animals

    City Song: Birds sing higher near urban traffic

    Birds in noisier city spots tend to sing at a higher pitch than do members of the same species in quieter neighborhoods.

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  3. Earth

    Protective Blanket: Atmosphere blocks many small stony asteroids

    A new computer model that more realistically simulates the aerodynamic forces on an object as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere suggests that the thin layer of air is an even better shield than previously thought.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Split Ends: Cancers follow shrinkage of chromosomes’ tips

    Genetic tabs called telomeres, which normally protect the ends of chromosomes, become undersized in many tissues that later turn cancerous, new studies in people show.

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  5. 19263

    I suspect that none of the researchers whose work was described in this article was ever a teenage girl with an absent (or distant) father. I think the simplest explanation is that the girls are looking for male affection and protection, which they can’t get any other way. Most of these girls just want to […]

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  6. Where’s Poppa? Absent dads linked to early sex by daughters

    Long-term studies conducted in the United States and New Zealand indicate that girls are particularly likely to engage in sexual activity before age 16 and to get pregnant as teenagers if they grew up in families without a father present.

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  7. Plants

    Stout Potatoes: Armed with a new gene, spuds fend off blight

    Splicing a gene from a blight-resistant wild potato into varieties used for consumption could lead to blight immunity for all spuds.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    No Hiding Most Trans Fats

    The current federal food-labeling law requires that manufacturers identify the major nutrients in processed foods, including total fat. Moreover, the law mandates that the “Nutrition Facts” section of each label separately list nutrients that can pose significant health risks, such as saturated fats. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced that beginning in 2006, […]

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  9. Tech

    Counting calories on the road

    People are programmed to spend about the same number of calories per day—roughly the energy of one hot dog—on daily travel, according to new analysis of British transportation statistics.

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  10. Astronomy

    Revved-up antics of a pulsar jet

    Flailing like an out-of-control fire hose, a mammoth jet of charged particles gushing from a collapsed star is varying its shape and brightness more rapidly than any other jet known in the heavens.

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  11. Materials Science

    Gas sensor uses nanotube parts

    New sensors use carbon nanotubes to analyze gas.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Viral protein could help liver therapy

    Researchers have developed a method of delivering gene therapies to targeted cells that makes use of viral proteins rather than whole virus particles.

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