All Stories
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Words Get in the Way
New studies explore people's tendency to have trouble recalling faces or other hard-to-describe perceptions after giving verbal accounts of them, with an eye toward improving police interviewing techniques with crime eyewitnesses.
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Happy Anniversary
In the 50 years since the discovery of DNA's double helix structure, scientists have developed striking new ways to visualize the molecule.
- Health & Medicine
Homing In on Ephedra’s Risks
On Feb. 16, pitcher Steve Bechler of the Baltimore Orioles collapsed while running sprints at the team’s spring-training camp in Florida. He died a few hours later. Subsequent investigation linked the 23-year-old player’s apparent heatstroke with a popular diet aid containing both caffeine and ephedra, a botanical product rich in other natural stimulants. Ephedra plant. […]
- Humans
From the April 15, 1933, issue
NARCISSI MERIT RECOGNITION AS PROPER EASTER FLOWERS Easter has always been a festival of flowers. Indeed, one of the reasons why the early missionary church found it comparatively easy to get its converts to adopt this holy day was because most of them already had a holiday at the same season–a celebration of the returning […]
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Left-Handed DNA
DNA strands in living cells normally have a right-hand twist–just like a standard wood or metal screw. The Left-Handed DNA Hall of Fame, maintained by Tom Schneider of the Laboratory of Experimental and Computational Biology at the National Institutes of Health, offers an amusing compendium of examples in which illustrators have unwittingly depicted DNA incorrectly […]
- Math
Prime conjecture verified to new heights
Computations show that all even integers up to 4 x 1014 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers, lending support to the Goldbach conjecture.
- Astronomy
Comet LINEAR: Breaking up isn’t hard to do
New images reveal that Comet LINEAR, which passed near the sun late last month, has broken into at least 10 fragments.
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Depression may play a role in stroke risk
Feelings of hopelessness and other signs of major depression markedly raise a person's likelihood of suffering a stroke.
- Physics
Attractive atoms pick up repulsive habits
Rubidium atoms intrinsically attract each other, but new experiments near absolute zero have induced the atoms to repel each another instead.
- Earth
Wildfires spread across a parched West
Dozens of lightning-sparked wildfires seared the western United States last week, adding hundreds of thousands of acres of charred terrain to a tally that promises to make this fire season the worst in recent decades.
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Ibuprofen cuts Alzheimer protein build-up
The common nonprescription drug ibuprofen may lessen abnormal accumulation of beta-amyloid in the brain, perhaps explaining how the drug decreases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
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Cleft-lip mutations may hinder virus
Having identified the mutated gene responsible for a syndrome involving cleft lip or palate, a research team finds that the recessive mutation also may confer an antiviral advantage to people who carry one copy of this gene.
