Feature
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Code Breakers
Scientists are altering bacteria in a most fundamental way.
- Chemistry
Photography at a Crossroads
Researchers are racing to understand the chemical processes used during the past 2 centuries to make photographs before digital-imaging techniques take over completely.
- Anthropology
Care-Worn Fossils
A nearly toothless fossil jaw found in France has reignited scientific debate over whether the skeletal remains of physically disabled individuals show that our Stone Age ancestors provided life-saving care to the ill and infirm.
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Building Blocks of Talk
When babies babble, they may say a lot about speech.
- Astronomy
Something New on the Sun
The sharpest visible-light images of the sun ever recorded are revealing puzzling, new features of sunspots, the dark regions where the sun's powerful magnetic field is concentrated.
- Tech
Hot Flashes, Cold Cuts
By obliterating matter in a never-before-seen way, a new breed of lasers cuts everything from eyeballs to diamonds with unprecedented precision.
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Sizing Up the Brain
Genetic mutations that produce small brains provide insight into the formation and evolution of the human brain.
- Astronomy
Jet Astronomy
For the first time, scientists have traced the slowing and dimming of X-ray-emitting jets from a black hole.
- Health & Medicine
Old Drug, New Uses?
A hormone called erythropoietin, long used to treat anemia, also seems to protect against nerve damage and holds promise as a new therapy for stroke and spinal cord injury.
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Red Snow, Green Snow
It's truly spring when those last white drifts go technicolor as algae bloom in the snow.
- 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.
