News
- Health & Medicine
Shocking findings
Implanted defibrillators reduce the occurrence of sudden death by about a third among people who had previous heart attacks and continue to suffer impaired heart function.
- Earth
Smog’s ozone spawns funky carpet smells
Strange, unpleasant odors may emanate from carpets for years due to reactions caused by exposure to smoggy air.
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Whazzits get their own insect order
Insect specimens that have puzzled museum curators for decades turn out to represent a lineage so odd that scientists have named a new order just for them.
- Chemistry
Fluorine atoms used to cut nanotubes
Researchers have found that they can cut carbon nanotubes into short, potentially useful pieces using a technique for adding groups of atoms to nanotubes.
- Chemistry
Unlikely ion made in lab
Chemists have created a molecule—the pentamethylcyclopentadienyl cation—that many researchers thought was too unstable to exist long enough to be identified or studied.
- Astronomy
Strange Stars? Odd features hint at novel matter
Two stellar corpses thought to be made of neutrons may actually contain weird forms of matter never observed before.
- Animals
Big-Eyed Birds Sing Early Songs: Dawn chorus explained
Researchers report a strong relationship between eye size and the light intensity at which birds start to sing in the morning.
- Materials Science
Membrane Mastery: Nanosize silica speeds up sieve
A novel modification to polymer membranes gives researchers a means to tune certain filters so they separate molecules more quickly and more selectively.
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European Union for Ants: Supercolony reigns from Italy to Portugal
European researchers have documented the largest ant supercolony yet, a network of cooperating nests that stretches from Italy to the Atlantic.
- Health & Medicine
Cardiac Culprit: Autopsies implicate C-reactive protein in fatal heart attacks
Of people who died suddenly, those who succumbed to a heart attack had an abundance of the inflammation indicator C-reactive protein in the blood, even though few had had outward signs of heart problems.
- Astronomy
Cosmic Remodeling: Superwinds star in early universe
New measurements reveal that some of the earliest galaxies in the universe produced winds so powerful and persistent that they blew material from one galaxy to another, temporarily separating dark matter from visible matter and profoundly influencing the evolution of future generations of galaxies.
- Paleontology
Older Ancestors: Primate origins age in new analysis
A controversial new statistical model concludes that the common ancestor of primates lived 81.5 million years ago, about 16 million years earlier than many paleontologists have estimated.
