News
- Anthropology
Fossil Skull Diversifies Family Tree
A 3.5-million-year-old skull found in Kenya represents a group of species in the human evolutionary family that evolved separately from australopithecines such as Lucy's kind in Ethiopia.
By Bruce Bower - Earth
A quick recovery after dinosaur deaths
Evidence from 65-million-year-old sediments suggests that a single impact from space wiped out the dinosaurs and that ecosystems recovered from the trauma in only a few thousand years.
By Sid Perkins - Earth
New analysis rejuvenates Himalayas
The Asian mountain range that includes some of the tallest peaks in the world turns out to be about 15 million years younger than geologists previously thought.
By Sid Perkins - Earth
Diesels: NO rises with altitude
The combustion chemistry of heavy-duty diesel trucks changes with altitude.
By Janet Raloff - Earth
Passive smoking’s carcinogenic traces
Researchers isolated markers of a cigarette-generated carcinogen in urine of nonsmoking women married to smokers.
By Janet Raloff - Health & Medicine
Fatty plaques are unstable in vessels
Fatty plaques that form on the inside of blood vessels are less stable and hence more prone to rupture than are hard, calcified plaques.
By Nathan Seppa - Health & Medicine
Parkinson’s implants survive in brain
Human embryonic stem cells transplanted into the brains of people with Parkinson's disease survive and grow better in patients under 60 years of age than in older patients.
By Nathan Seppa - Astronomy
Creating a warmer, wetter Mars
A new study adds to the evidence that past volcanic activity could have temporarily created a warmer, wetter Mars, a place on which water once flowed freely.
By Ron Cowen - Health & Medicine
Drug helps against certain breast cancers
In some patients, the drug trastuzumab, also called Herceptin, slows breast cancer that has spread to other organs.
By Nathan Seppa - Physics
Some swell materials give up their secret
The discovery of a previously overlooked crystal structure in the best so-called piezoelectric materials may explain their remarkable amount of swelling when zapped by an electric field.
By Peter Weiss - Health & Medicine
Narcoleptic dogs still have their day
Evidence from studies with dachshunds and poodles is suggesting that these small breeds may serve as better models than larger dogs, such as Labrador retrievers, for the more genetically complex narcolepsy in people.
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Chemical SOS not just for farm, lab plants
The chemical screams for help that scientists have detected from agricultural plants under attack by pests in lab settings have now been heard in the wild.
By Susan Milius