News
- Health & Medicine
Umbilical Bounty: Cord blood shows value against leukemia
Umbilical cord blood transplants offer a viable treatment alternative for leukemia patients who don't have a matching bone marrow donor.
- Paleontology
Subway dig in L.A. yields fossil trove
Fossil finds made when a subway line was extended from Los Angeles into the San Fernando Valley include bones of mastodons, ground sloths, extinct bison and camels, and 39 new species of fish.
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Nightlife: Marsupial meets mistletoe
A tiny marsupial in Argentina turns out to disperse mistletoe seeds, a job once presumed to be for the birds.
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Great tits inherit egg spots from mom
An unusual study of eggshell spots suggests that there may be a gene for spottiness on the great tit's female sex chromosome.
- Tech
Ink-jet dots form transistor spots
A new technique makes ink-jet printing of transistor circuits possible from conductive polymer inks.
- Chemistry
Researchers stretch for improved surfaces
A surprisingly simple, new technique could create better coatings for everything from medical implants to ship hulls.
- Math
Proof clarifies a map-folding problem
Researchers have developed an efficient algorithm to determine, given a collection of creases on a piece of paper, whether a sequence of simple folds produces a flat result, like a folded road map.
- Animals
Birds may inherit their taste for the town
Tests switching cliff swallow nestlings to colonies of different sizes suggest the birds inherit their preference for group size.
- Health & Medicine
Drugs counteract irritable bowel syndrome
Antibiotics can knock out bacteria overload in the small intestine, temporarily reversing irritable bowel syndrome.
- Earth
Salmon puzzle: Why did males turn female?
Most of the spawning female Chinook salmon in one part of the Columbia River appear to have started life as males.
- Planetary Science
Ganymede May Have Vast Hidden Ocean
A combination of images, spectra, and magnetic field measurements suggests that in addition to Jupiter's moon Europa, another Jovian moon, Ganymede, may also have had—and might still harbor—an ocean.
- Archaeology
Pompeii’s burial not its first disaster
Recent excavations reveal that the city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, experienced several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its demise.
