News
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Psychopaths may come in two varieties
Preliminary evidence suggests that some psychopaths, who exploit others and commit crimes without guilt or remorse, avoid criminal conviction by relying on a heightened emotional sensitivity to risky situations.
- Ecosystems
Streamers could save birds from hooks
A test on active longline fishing boats finds that an inexpensive array of streamers can reduce accidental deaths of seabirds by more than 90 percent.
- Physics
Window Opens into Strange Nuclei
By creating peculiar atomic nuclei that contain not just protons and neutrons but also pairs of rare nuclear particles with so-called strange quarks inside, researchers are shedding new light on the fundamental structure of matter and how it behaves under extreme conditions, as in neutron stars.
- Chemistry
Carbon-70 fullerenes finally link up
Researchers have coaxed the cage-like molecules of carbon-70 into zigzagging polymers.
- Chemistry
Chemists make molecules with less mess
Researchers have found a way for a widely used, commercially important chemical reaction to produce less pollution.
- 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.
