News
- Computing
New initiatives scale up supercomputing
Several government efforts aim to give researchers access to computing power in the range of 12 trillion operations per second or more.
- Earth
Sahara to get hotter, drier, smaller
By the end of this century, the world's hottest desert will be even hotter, drier, and smaller than it is now, according to an international team of climate modelers.
- Earth
Resetting a clock from Earth’s rocks
Better measurements of one of the rates of radioactive decay used to date extremely old rocks open up the possibility that Earth may have had a crust as many as 200 million years earlier than previously thought.
- Computing
Web worms: Code Red to Warhol
Using an efficient infection strategy, a malicious programmer could deploy a rogue computer program far more voracious than the Code Red worm that struck on July 19.
- Physics
Accelerators load some new ammo: Crystals
To make denser accelerator beams that may open new doors in physics, researchers have chilled ions in a miniature test accelerator until the ions coalesced into crystals.
- Materials Science
Chemical sensors gain true portability
Researchers have designed simple new films for indicating the presence of worrisome airborne chemicals.
- Earth
Deep-sea gear takes wild ride on lava
When a set of instruments monitoring an underwater volcano got trapped in an eruption in early 1998, the scientists who had deployed the sensors ended up with more data than they bargained for.
- Animals
Smart tags show unexpected tuna trips
The first report on Atlantic bluefin tuna wearing electronic tags reveals much more dashing across the ocean than expected.
- Astronomy
Astronomers spy familiar planetary system
Studying a star in the Big Dipper, astronomers have for the first time found a planetary system that reminds them of home.
- Health & Medicine
Drugs Counter Mad Cow Agent in Cells
Fueled only by promising studies of cells, a California research team has invited controversy by beginning to give a little-used malaria drug to patients who have the human version of mad cow disease.
- Humans
Cloning hearing creates media frenzy
A panel reviewing human cloning heard the pros and cons of the issue during a fiery debate.
- Humans
Bush favors some stem cell research
President Bush said he would support work on stem cells that already had been propagated from embryos otherwise fated for disposal in fertility clinics, but he opposes financing the destruction of additional embryos to create new cell lines.
