Feature
- Tech
Virtual Nanotech
With computers becoming ever more powerful, researchers are simulating nanoscale materials and devices down to the level of atoms and even electrons.
- Earth
Danger on Deck?
The Environmental Protection Agency no longer allows residential installation of pressure-treated lumber and recommends the application of sealant to prevent leaching of carcinogens out of existing lumber structures.
- Health & Medicine
Telltale Charts
Overturning a basic tenet of conventional wisdom in cardiology, new research suggests that more than half the people who develop heart disease first show one of the warning signs of smoking, having diabetes, or having high blood pressure or cholesterol.
- Physics
Wet ‘n’ Wild
Scientists have tracked the weirdness of water to microscopic arrangements of molecules and perhaps to the existence of a second, low-temperature form of the familiar substance.
- Paleontology
L.A.’s Oldest Tourist Trap
Modern excavations at the La Brea tar pits are revealing a wealth of information about local food chains during recent ice ages, as well as details about what happened to trapped animals in their final hours.
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Reef Relations
The discovery of humanlike genes in coral means that the common ancestor of both humans and coral was more complex than previously assumed.
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Human, Mouse, Rat . . . What’s Next?
Scientists lobby for a chimpanzee genome project.
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Fear Not
Scientists find that facing your fears enables you to suppress them.
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When to Change Sex
A research team contends that animals that routinely change sex, even those prompted by mate loss or other social cues, tend to do so when they reach 72 percent of their maximum size.
- Earth
Infrasonic Symphony
Scientists are eavesdropping on volcanoes, avalanches, earthquakes, and meteorites to discern these phenomena's infrasound signatures and see what new information infrasound might reveal.
- Materials Science
News That’s Fit to Print—and Preserve
Analyses of newsprint materials suggest that, despite their frail appearance, newspapers can last more than 200 years in storage—a fact that calls into question the merits of microfilming.
