News
- 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.
- Astronomy
Shocks jolt jet set galaxy, X rays reveal
A new image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A reveals the first details of a phenomenon associated with the core of many galaxies: a huge jet of high-energy particles shooting out from a supermassive black hole.
- Animals
20/20 lenses coat body of sea creature
The skeleton of brittlestars doubles as an array of optically precise lenses that rival plastic microlenses designed by engineers.
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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.
