News
- Life
Fly fountain of youth
Hanging out with young, healthy flies helps fruit flies with a mutation that causes neurodegeneration live longer.
- Planetary Science
See how it lands
A camera on a Mars-orbiting spacecraft caught an image of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute just before it descended onto the Red Planet’s northern plains on May 25.
- Planetary Science
Touchdown! Phoenix lands on Mars
The first close-up color images of the northern arctic circle on the Red Planet were recorded by the Mars Phoenix Lander spacecraft only a few hours after its flawless descent at 7:38 p.m. EDT, May 25. The detailed images suggest ice lies beneath the hard soil.
- Physics
Tight deadline
Light behaves like waves or particles, but it doesn’t know what it will do in advance.
- Space
Many stars, many planets
A new study reveals that as many as 30 percent of sunlike stars have close-in, relatively small planets — only 4 to 30 times as heavy as Earth.
- Anthropology
They’re fake, Indy!
Scientists find that two rock crystal skulls often attributed to pre-Columbian societies are really modern phonies.
-
- Life
Rock-hard evidence
Newly discovered dinosaur tracks, the first ever reported from the Arabia Peninsula, indicate that a part of the now-arid region was teeming with dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.
-
- Space
Martian sands
Sandy soil on the Red Planet hints at an ancient mix of volcanic activity and water, a potent breeding ground for life.
- Space
Gamma-ray bling!
A recent, unusually luminous gamma-ray burst is shedding new light on these stellar explosions and the visible light they produce.
- Health & Medicine
Vacillating stem cells
Unsuspected, ever-changing variation among stem cells in bone marrow helps determine the development path the cells will follow during differentiation.
