Feature
- Health & Medicine
Vitamin Boost
Vitamin D is being linked to a host of health benefits that go well beyond stronger bones, extending to muscle preservation and some protection against cancer, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
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- Archaeology
Original Microbrews
Pots, vats, and other artifacts unearthed on three continents are giving archaeologists new clues about ancient cultures' beer-brewing practices.
- Physics
Information, Please
Understanding whether the information swallowed by black holes is destroyed forever may provide physicists with new clues for unifying gravity and quantum theories.
- Tech
Hungry for Nano
The food industry is turning to nanotechnology as it searches for innovations that could bring safer, healthier, and tastier products to consumers.
- Physics
Extreme Impersonations
By creating tiny clouds of remarkable new kinds of ultracold gases, physicists are, in essence, bringing to their lab benches chunks of some of the most extraordinary and hard-to-study matter in the universe.
- Anthropology
In the Neandertal Mind
Neandertals possessed much the same mental capacity as ancient people did, but a genetically inspired memory boost toward the end of the Stone Age may have allowed Homo sapiens to prosper while Neandertals died out.
- Agriculture
The Ultimate Crop Insurance
A new treaty renews hope that the waning diversity in agricultural crops can be slowed, and important genes preserved, both in the field and in gene banks.
- Health & Medicine
Figuring Out Fibroids
Researchers now have a better understanding of which women develop fibroids and what causes them.
- Tech
Ocean Envy
By mimicking the flippers of penguins, whales, and dolphins, engineers hope to make ocean vessels that are as maneuverable and efficient as the marine animals.
- Earth
Paved Paradise?
The precipitation-fed runoff that spills from impervious surfaces such as buildings, roads, and parking lots in developed areas increases erosion in streams, wreaks ecological havoc there, and contributes to urban heat islands.
- Plants
Smokey the Gardener
Wildfire smoke by itself, without help from heat, can trigger germination in certain seeds, but just what the vital compound in that smoke might be has kept biologists busy for years.
