Feature
- Humans
Errant Texts
New studies lambaste popular middle-school science texts for being uninspiring, superficial, and error-ridden.
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Learning in Waves
Learning plays a largely unappreciated role in mental development, according to researchers who examine the variety of tactics children adopt as they attempt to solve problems in mathematics and other areas.
- Health & Medicine
Making Sense of Centenarians
The number of centenarians is expected to double every ten years, making this formerly rare group one of the fastest-growing in the developed world. Researchers are turning to studies of the oldest old to determine how genes, lifestyle, and social factors contribute to longevity.
- Physics
Jiggling the Cosmic Ooze
Spurred by the first tentative sightings after a decades-old search, physicists seeking the universe's mass-giving particle — the Higgs boson — have fired up the world's highest-energy particle collider to join the pursuit.
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Why Fly into a Forest Fire?
Scientists puzzle over why some wasps and beetles race to forest fires.
- Health & Medicine
The Good Trans Fat
One arcane family of fats may be tapped to treat or prevent a host of diseases.
- Astronomy
Mining the Sky
A proposed national virtual observatory, a mammoth computer database integrating spectra, images, and other information covering the entire sky, could usher in a new age of discovery in astronomy.
- Earth
A Nation Aflame
In the wake of one of the worst fire seasons in the past 50 years, scientists are assessing risk as more people move into fire-prone areas and developing ways to better predict the behavior of--and the potential for--wildfires.
- Materials Science
From Metal Bars to Candy Bars
Materials scientists have turned the tools of their trade on some of the most familiar substances in the world: food.
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Into the Mystic
Scientists confront the hazy realm of spiritual enlightenment.
- Health & Medicine
Statins Take On the Brain
Cholesterol-lowering drugs may also treat or prevent Alzheimer's disease.
- Tech
Hop . . . Hop . . . Hopbots!
Two prototype jumping robots that hop, crash-and-land, and then hop again are demonstrating a novel mobility concept that may finally enable small, cheap robots to roam widely over rough terrain.
