News
- Paleontology
New fossil sheds light on dinosaurs’ diet
Vestiges of soft tissue preserved in a 70-million-year-old Mongolian fossil suggest that some dinosaurs could have strained small bits of food from the water and mud of streams and ponds, just like some modern aquatic birds do.
- Health & Medicine
Insulin lowers more than blood sugar
Insulin may reduce inflammation and protect the heart.
- Health & Medicine
Healing the heart from within
An unusual mouse strain can regenerate heart tissue when the organ is damaged.
- Health & Medicine
Stem cell research marches on
Cells from human embryos can be transformed into heart cells or insulin-secreting cells.
- Paleontology
Completing a titan by getting a head
When paleontologists unearthed the skeleton of a 70-million-year-old titanosaur in Madagascar in the late 1990s, they also recovered something that had been missing from previous such finds: a skull that matched the body.
- Paleontology
That’s no footprint, it’s got no toes
The impressions near Isona, Spain, long thought to be fossilized dinosaur footprints may actually record the feeding behavior of stingrays.
- Animals
Big woodpeckers trash others’ homes
Pileated woodpeckers destroy in an afternoon the nesting cavities that take endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers 6 years to excavate.
- Animals
When rare species eat endangered ones
To cut down on their salmon smolt catch, Caspian terns were encouraged to move from one island to another in the Columbia River.
- Animals
Oops. New feathers turn out lousy
Going to the trouble of molting doesn't really get rid of a bird's lice after all.
- Animals
Stinking decorations protect nests
The common waxbill's habit of adorning its nests with fur plucked from carnivore scat turns out to discourage attacks from predators.
- Chemistry
Chemists redesign natural antifreeze
Researchers have synthesized a family of artificial molecules that resemble the compounds that keep Antarctic and Arctic fish from freezing.
- Earth
L.A. moves, but not in the way expected
Researchers monitoring small ground motions along faults in Southern California ended up detecting an altogether different phenomenon: the rise and fall of the ground as local governments pump billions of gallons of water into and out of the region's aquifers.
