News

  1. Health & Medicine

    Two arthritis drugs work best in tandem

    Two anti-inflammatory drugs for rheumatoid arthritis—methotrexate and etanercept—work better together than either does individually.

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  2. Earth

    Pompeii debris yields calamity clues

    The magnetic characteristics of rocks and debris excavated from Pompeii reveal the changing temperatures of the volcanic ash cloud that smothered the Italian city in A.D. 79.

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  3. Anthropology

    Extinct ancestor wasn’t so finicky

    Contrary to much anthropological thought, the genus Paranthropus showed as much dietary and behavioral flexibility as ancient Homo species did between 3 million and 1 million years ago.

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  4. Earth

    Deep Pacific waters warmed in recent years

    Oceanographic data gathered across the North Pacific in 1985 and again in 1999 indicate that the deepest waters there have been heating up.

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  5. Chemistry

    New champions among corrosive microbes

    Newly discovered strains of bacteria have developed a metabolic shortcut for eating away iron with great efficiency.

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  6. Materials Science

    Cinching nanotubes into tough fibers

    Irradiating bundles of carbon nanotubes can lead to tougher fibers.

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  7. Physics

    Radioactive sprinkles keep machines true

    Needing tiny radioactive sources to calibrate medical scanners with ever-sharper vision, an Australian team dipped tiny balls the size of candy sprinkles into a radioactive liquid.

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  8. Earth

    Lowering the Boom? Impact crater may predate extinction of the dinosaurs

    Analyses of sediments from the Yucatán in Mexico suggest that an extraterrestrial impact there more than 65 million years ago actually happened about 300,000 years before mass extinctions of dinosaurs occurred.

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  9. Worst of Two Worlds: Hybrid mosquitoes spread West Nile virus

    Interbreeding between two Old World mosquito species may explain why their blood-sucking brethren in the United States transmit West Nile virus to people as readily as they do.

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  10. Physics

    Bubble Fusion: Once-maligned claim rebounds

    Researchers who reported 2 years ago that they created nuclear-fusion reactions inside bubbles imploding in a vat of liquid acetone have now bolstered their controversial claim with new evidence.

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  11. Anthropology

    Early Ancestors Come Together: Humanity’s roots may lie in single, diverse genus

    Newly discovered fossil teeth in eastern Africa that are more than 5 million years old suggest that the earliest members of the human family evolved as a single, anatomically diverse genus.

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  12. Animals

    Jungle Genes: First bird genome is decoded

    Researchers have unveiled a draft of the first bird genome to be sequenced, a vintage chicken.

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