All Stories
- Archaeology
Neandertals’ diet put meat in their bones
Chemical analyses of Neandertals' bones portray these ancient Europeans as skillful hunters and avid meat eaters, countering a theory that they mainly scavenged scraps of meat from abandoned carcasses.
- Math
Punctured Polyhedra
A tetrahedron. Examples of unacceptable faces. A portion of an infinite lattice of interpenetrating tetrahedra. A tetrahedron has four triangular faces, four vertices, and six edges. Consider what happens when a vertex of one tetrahedron pierces the face of a second tetrahedron to form a new, more complicated polyhedron. In the resulting geometric form, one […]
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Brain’s Moving Experience: Motion illusion yields a neural surprise
A brain-imaging study indicates that the primary motor cortex, the control center for issuing motor commands, also aids in the perception of the body's position and planning for upcoming movements.
- Health & Medicine
Male Pill on the Horizon: Drug disables mouse sperm but wears off quickly
A new oral drug created to ease a genetic disorder could have contraceptive benefits.
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I found this article quite fascinating. In 1973, my colleagues and I showed that rats would respond with the future in mind. Specifically, rats will make a response that results in one immediate electric shock, as long as that punished response is instrumental in avoiding five identical shocks programmed to occur 10 seconds later. It […]
- Ecosystems
Trust That Bird? A bit of future-think lets jays cooperate
A blue jay will cooperate with a buddy for mutual gain in food despite opportunities to betray the partnership.
- Earth
Dust Up: Office bustle launches anthrax spores
The commotion of everyday business in indoor spaces contaminated with anthrax can launch the bacterium's dangerous spores into the air.
- Planetary Science
Martian History: Weathering a new notion
Researchers suggest that intermittent impacts by huge asteroids and comets some 3.5 billion years ago profoundly influenced the landscape of Mars.
- Health & Medicine
First-Line Treatment: Chronic-leukemia drug clears a big hurdle
In its first large-scale test on newly diagnosed leukemia patients, the drug imatinib—also called Gleevec and STI-571—stopped or reversed the disease in nearly all patients receiving it.
- Physics
Identity Check: Elusive neutrinos morph on Earth, as in space
Strengthening a challenge to the prevailing theory of particle physics, measurements of elusive particles called antineutrinos from nuclear reactors suggest that no neutrino types, be they matter or antimatter, have stable identities.
- Health & Medicine
Visionary science for the intestine
A tiny disposable flash camera that a person swallows can detect problems in the small intestine.
- Health & Medicine
Bone scan reveals estrogen effects
Using a scanning technology called microcomputerized tomography, scientists have a new way to look at the difference between bone exposed to estrogen and bone deprived of it.
