News
- Earth
Sensing a vibe
A sprawling network of seismometers that covers the Los Angeles area could be adapted to provide warning of damaging ground motions from earthquakes in the seconds before those seismic vibes arrive.
- Physics
Crystal Bash: Shocking changes to light’s properties
Prized, light-manipulating microstructures known as photonic crystals may transform light in new and technologically tantalizing ways when jolted by shock waves.
- Anthropology
Ancestral Bushwhack: Hominid tree gets trimmed twice
In separate presentations at scientific meetings, two anthropologists challenged the influential view that the human evolutionary family has contained as many as 20 different fossil species.
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Egg’s missing proteins thwart primate cloning
Scientists have identified a reason why cloning a person may be difficult, if not impossible.
- Physics
Not even bismuth-209 lasts forever
Touted in textbooks as the heaviest stable, naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209 actually does decay but with an astonishingly long half-life of 19 billion billion years.
- Earth
Harbor waves yield secrets to analysis
New findings by ocean scientists may help port officials in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, predict potentially destructive waves in the city's harbor.
- Tech
Tipping tiny scales
A prototype detector based on a tiny silicon cantilever that operates in air has achieved a 1,000-fold sensitivity boost when measuring tiny quantities of chemical agents.
- Planetary Science
Roving on the Red Planet
NASA last month selected the landing sites for rovers scheduled to begin exploring the Martian surface next January.
- Earth
Seismic waves resolve continental debate
New analyses of seismic waves that have traveled deep within Earth may answer a decades-old question about the thickness of the planet's continents.
- Health & Medicine
Protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease
Inhibiting the natural protein cyclo-oxygenase-2, or COX-2, might help fight Parkinson's disease.
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Out of China: SARS virus’ genome hints at independent evolution
The newly identified SARS virus is the product of a long and private evolutionary history, clues from its genome suggest.
- Materials Science
Blunt Answer: Cracking the puzzle of elastic solids’ toughness
Rubbery materials prove tougher than theory predicts because cracks trying to penetrate those stretchy materials grow blunt at their tips.
