Feature

  1. Animals

    The Social Lives of Snakes

    A lot of pit vipers aren't the asocial loners that even snake fans had long assumed.

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  2. Mother and Child Disunion

    Data on extensive giveaways of daughters by their mothers in northern Taiwan a century ago may challenge influential theories of innate maternal sentiments.

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  3. The Bad Seed

    Researchers are racing to identify tumor-forming stem cells in skin, lung, pancreatic, and many other cancers.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Know Your Enemy

    Scientists mine the tuberculosis genome.

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  5. Astronomy

    Invisible Universe

    X-ray astronomy opens a new window on the most energetic cosmic events.

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  6. Planetary Science

    A New Flight Plan

    President Bush recently unveiled an ambitious plan for a manned mission to Mars, using the moon as a testing area and stepping-stone, but for many planetary scientists the moon is a desirable destination in and of itself.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Born to Heal

    The controversial strategy of screening embryos to produce donors for siblings raises hopes and presents new ethical dilemmas.

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  8. Tech

    Body Builders

    By growing stem cells on three- dimensional polymer scaffolds, tissue engineers hope to mimic natural tissue development and ultimately produce replacement body parts.

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  9. Earth

    Killer Waves

    Scientists are using sophisticated computer models, field studies of coastal geology, and data from tidal gauges to assess the tsunami risk for coastal residents.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Inflammatory Fat

    Immune system cells may underlie much of the disease-provoking injury in obese individuals that has been linked to their excess fat.

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  11. Computing

    Straining for Speed

    Hitting fundamental limits on how small they can make certain structures within semiconductor transistors, chip makers are deforming the silicon crystals from which those transistors are made to eke out some extra speed.

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  12. Math

    Computation’s New Leaf

    Plants in which large numbers of simple units interact with one another appear to compute how to coordinate the actions of their cells effectively.

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