All Stories

  1. Health & Medicine

    Federal Government Launches Organic Standards

    Though for decades some foods have carried the label “organic,” consumers never could be sure exactly what the term meant. Action by the Department of Agriculture last week should clarify things. USDA USDA On Oct. 21, USDA implemented regulations governing the production and labeling of organic foods. Until now, bodies from state governments to trade […]

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  2. Physics

    Motor design flouts physical law

    A proposed silicon device the size of a red blood cell would transform random thermal motion into useful mechanical power in violation of the second law of thermodynamics, its designers claim.

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  3. Materials Science

    Knitting with nanotubes

    Researchers can draw fine yarns of carbon nanotubes from a reservoir of the microscopic cylinders.

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  4. Humans

    From the May 17, 1930, issue

    POLISH RHINOCEROS One of the most interesting of recent finds in paleontology has been the complete carcass of a Pleistocene rhinoceros, unearthed in an abandoned mine in the Starunia region in Poland. Skin, hair muscles, and all other tissues were well preserved, owing to the sealing up of the monster in a kind of oily […]

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  5. Physics

    Putting the brakes on antihydrogen

    By mixing ultracold antiprotons and antielectrons, physicists have created the first atoms of antihydrogen that move at a leisurely enough pace for direct measurements of their properties.

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  6. Plants

    X-rayed Flowers

    For new insights into the delicate architecture of flowers, take an X-ray view. Albert G. Richards, who taught dental radiography at the University of Michigan, presents a gallery of unfamiliar views of familiar flowers, from the hidden archways of an iris to the complex plumbing of columbine spurs. Go to: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~agrxray/gallery.html

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  7. Brain trait fosters stress disorder

    A brain-scan study of pairs of twin brothers, in each of which only one twin had been a Vietnam combat veteran, indicates that the inheritance of an undersized brain structure called the hippocampus predisposes individuals to post-traumatic stress disorder.

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  8. Ant cheats plant; plant cheats back

    An Amazonian tree grows little pouches on its leaves to invite ants to move in and provide guard duty, but the tree drops the pouches from old leaves because ants ravage the flowers.

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  9. Astronomy

    Enlarging a Mars photo album

    A new set of more than 18,000 images of Mars, posted online in early October, features the sharpest picture of the Red Planet ever taken by an orbiting spacecraft.

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  10. Tech

    Triggering genes in a flash

    A light pulse can activate or deactivate selected genes in cells.

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  11. 19196

    The article claims that Lake Agassiz became the world’s largest lake. It seems to me that the same conditions should have occurred in Asia. Shouldn’t you compare Lake Agassiz to glacier-dam-produced lakes in Asia and contemporary freshwater versions of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea? Robert W. DavisMillburn, N.J. According to Martin Jakobsson of […]

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  12. Earth

    Once Upon a Lake

    As Earth warmed at the end of the last ice age, the immense volumes of fresh water that occasionally and catastrophically spilled from Lake Agassiz—the long-defunct lake that formed as the ice sheet smothering Canada melted—may have caused global climate change and sudden rises in sea level.

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