News
- Earth
Wildfires spread across a parched West
Dozens of lightning-sparked wildfires seared the western United States last week, adding hundreds of thousands of acres of charred terrain to a tally that promises to make this fire season the worst in recent decades.
- Physics
Attractive atoms pick up repulsive habits
Rubidium atoms intrinsically attract each other, but new experiments near absolute zero have induced the atoms to repel each another instead.
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Depression may play a role in stroke risk
Feelings of hopelessness and other signs of major depression markedly raise a person's likelihood of suffering a stroke.
- Astronomy
Comet LINEAR: Breaking up isn’t hard to do
New images reveal that Comet LINEAR, which passed near the sun late last month, has broken into at least 10 fragments.
- Math
Prime conjecture verified to new heights
Computations show that all even integers up to 4 x 1014 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers, lending support to the Goldbach conjecture.
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Babies posture to learn
Infants make better action-oriented decisions when they adopt a familiar posture, such as sitting upright, instead of an unfamiliar one, such as crawling.
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Hypnotic hues in the brain
Hypnosis uniquely colors the activity of brain areas involved in visual perception, supporting the view that hypnotized people enter a distinct psychological state rather than only play a role designed to please the hypnotist.
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Banning deer boosts migratory birds
In a 9-year test, excluding deer raised the population numbers among bird species, such as hooded warblers, that have a high conservation priority.
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Parasite deludes rats into liking cats
A protozoan that infects rats dims their wariness around cats and can even lead to what Oxford researchers call a fatal attraction.
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Wasp redesigns web of doomed spider
A wasp larva injects a spider with a web-altering drug, driving the spider to spin a shelter just right for a wasp cocoon.
- Earth
Where’s Waldo . . . and 6 billion others?
Scientists have combined satellite imagery and detailed census data to develop a worldwide database that can provide estimates of the number of people located in areas on a grid that has boxes with areas of 1 square kilometer or less.
- Earth
Early web-footed bird made impression
Researchers have discovered the fossil tracks of an otherwise unknown bird in 110-million-year-old sediments, which pushes back evidence of web-footed birds by at least 25 million years.
