News
-
Baboon rumps signal quality of motherhood
The size of the swellings on a female baboon’s rump match her physical prowess for motherhood, a rare case of reproductive-quality advertisement in females.
- Earth
Is there a vent in the global greenhouse?
Satellite observations of ocean temperatures in tropical regions of the western Pacific suggest that when ocean temperatures there warm up, the amount of heat-trapping cirrus clouds decreases, possibly providing a heat-venting effect that could help reduce global warming.
- Planetary Science
Debate over life in Mars rock rekindles
Two recent studies could inject new life into the argument that a 4-billion-year-old Martian meteorite contains fossils of bacteria from the Red Planet but several scientists say the reports fall short of resurrecting that notion.
- Paleontology
Dinosaur fossil yields feathery structures
Researchers believe they have found primitive feathers on the remains of Sinornithosaurus millenii, a 124-million-year-old raptor dinosaur from Liaoning, China.
- Materials Science
Scientists belt out a novel nanostructure
Researchers have used metal oxides to make microscopic ribbonlike structures that could prove useful for developing future nanoscale devices.
-
Self-illusions come back to bite students
College freshmen who greatly overestimate their academic potential feel confident and happy for a while, but as they move toward graduation, these students feel progressively worse about themselves and become less involved with their schoolwork, a new study finds.
- Health & Medicine
Sedentary Off-hours Link to Alzheimer’s
People who have Alzheimer's disease in old age were generally less active physically and intellectually between the ages of 20 and 60 than were people who don't have the disease.
- Physics
When warming up causes cooling down
Under the right circumstances, heating a tiny cluster of sodium atoms makes its temperature fall.
- Physics
Physicists get B in antimatter studies
New observations that subatomic particles called B mesons decay differently from their antimatter versions may help explain why the universe is made almost entirely of matter, not antimatter.
-
Quoll male die-off doesn’t fit pattern
Males of a ferretlike marsupial called a quoll die off after one mating season-unusual behavior that suggests the need for new theories of why such deaths occur after mating.
-
Stick insects: Three females remain
An Australian expedition locates three females of a big, flightless stick insect species thought to have gone extinct.
- Astronomy
Magnetic flip heralds solar max
Scientists have found another indicator that the sun has reached the maximum of its current activity cycle: The polarity of its magnetic field has reversed.
