News
- Paleontology
Pollination in the pre-flower-power era
Scorpionflies with long-reaching mouthparts may have helped plants procreate long before blossoms evolved.
- Space
Gamma-ray sources guide astronomers to pulsars
Gamma-ray emissions are providing a guide to finding the compact, rapidly rotating remnants of massive stars known as pulsars.
- Humans
Newborn babies may cry in their mother tongues
Days after birth, French and German infants wail to the melodic structure of their languages.
- Space
Giant galaxy graveyard grows
The largest known galactic congregation is bigger than astronomers thought—and its inhabitants are all dead or dying.
- Health & Medicine
Vaccine may head off genital cancer in women
An experimental immunization can clear up premalignant growths caused by the human papillomavirus in some patients.
- Earth
Small earthquakes may not predict larger ones
Quakes far from tectonic plate boundaries may simply be aftershocks of ancient temblors.
- Animals
Textbook case of color-changing spider reopened
Female crab spiders switch colors to match flowers but may not fool their prey
- Space
Volcanic and ferric surprises on Mercury
Volcanic activity is more recent than expected, MESSENGER shows on its third flyby of the planet. Also, surface iron occurs as oxides.
- Space
New way to help avoid a space shuttle disaster
A new technique to make shuttle launches safer combines tricks from particle colliders, moon landings and vulture tracking.
- Climate
Mount Kilimanjaro could soon be bald
The world-renowned ice caps could disappear by 2022, new research suggests.
- Space
Cosmic rays traced to centers of star birth
By detecting gamma rays, a new generation of telescopes bolsters theory that supernovas are origin of some cosmic rays
- Health & Medicine
HIV self-test proves accurate
Study in an ER shows individuals successfully determined their own HIV status.
