News
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MathSpheres in Disguise: Solid proof offered for famous conjecture
A Russian mathematician has proposed a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a question about the shapes of three-dimensional spaces.
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Health & MedicineTeen taters, too
The epidemic of adolescent obesity may owe more to a paucity of exercise than to a growing intake of calories.
By Janet Raloff -
Health & MedicineAthletes develop whey-better muscles
Dietary supplements coupling whey and creatine promote the development of bigger, stronger muscles in experienced body builders.
By Janet Raloff -
EarthPrenatal nicotine: A role in SIDS?
New data suggest why exposure to nicotine in the womb can put an infant at greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
By Janet Raloff -
Health & MedicineLittle vessels react to magnetic switch
Magnets can act like vascular switches, increasing or decreasing blood flow to a region of the body.
By Janet Raloff -
EarthTraces of lead cause outsize harm
Minute amounts of lead in blood are worse for children than had been realized.
By Ben Harder -
PaleontologyAncestors Go South
A group of new and previously excavated fossils in South Africa represents 4-million-year-old members of the human evolutionary family, according to an analysis of the sediment that covered the finds.
By Bruce Bower -
AnimalsChicks open wide, ultraviolet mouths
The first analysis of what the mouths of begging birds look like in the ultraviolet spectrum reveals a dramatic display that birds can see but people can't.
By Susan Milius -
PhysicsAnswer blows in wind, swirls in soap
A swirling soap film gives new clues to how turbulent flows, such as the circulation of Earth's atmosphere, squander their energy.
By Peter Weiss -
AstronomyTelescope takes close-ups of distant star
Radio astronomers have for the first time probed ejected gas in the immediate surroundings of a distant star.
By Ron Cowen -
PaleontologyFeathered fossil still stirs debate
More than 2 years after scientists first described 120-million-year-old fossils of a feathered animal, a new analysis seems to bolster the view that the turkey-size species was a bird has-been and not a bird wanna-be.
By Sid Perkins -
TechNanotechnologists get a squirt gun, almost
A novel computer simulation of molecular behavior suggests that a minuscule squirt gun able to spit liquids a few hundred nanometers ought to work.
By Peter Weiss