News

  1. Materials Science

    Explosive tempers

    Researchers have demonstrated that carbon nanotubes, once ignited, can detonate explosives.

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  2. Animals

    Proxy Vampire: Spider eats blood by catching mosquitoes

    Researchers studying food preferences among spiders report finding the first one with a taste for vertebrate blood.

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  3. High Times for Brain Growth: Marijuana-like drug multiplies neurons

    A drug that functions as concentrated marijuana does may spur the process by which the brain gives birth to new nerve cells.

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  4. Chemistry

    Chemical Dancing: Chemists choreograph molecular moves for Nobel honor

    This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists for their work on a versatile strategy for synthesizing all manner of chemical compounds in an environmentally friendly way.

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  5. Anthropology

    Encore for Evolutionary Small-Timers: Tiny human cousins get younger with new finds

    Excavations in an Indonesian cave have yielded more fossils of short, upright creatures that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago.

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  6. Earth

    Drought’s heat killed Southwest’s piñon forests

    The heat accompanying a drought and a plague of bark beetles seem to explain the deaths of swathes of piñon pine trees across the Southwest in 2002 and 2003.

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  7. Tech

    Road Warriors: Robotic vehicles triumph over desert obstacles

    In a landmark contest that has spurred advances in robotic-vehicle technology, five driverless racing machines piloted themselves over more than 200 kilometers of rugged desert terrain.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Vaccine Clears Major Hurdle: Injections offer new tool against cervical cancers

    An experimental vaccine against the virus that causes most cancers of the cervix has passed a test typically needed for regulatory approval.

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  9. Paleontology

    Raptor Line: Fossil finds push back dinosaur ancestry

    Fossils of a newly discovered raptor dinosaur species suggest that the reptile's lineage is older and more widespread than previously suspected.

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  10. Materials Science

    Filling in the blanks

    Scientists have added precision to a patterning technique called microcontact printing.

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  11. Planetary Science

    Mission to the outer limits

    NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has taken up temporary residence at the Kennedy Space Center, where engineers are doing final testing before the craft begins its 9-year voyage to the outer solar system.

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  12. Earth

    The browning of Europe

    The lengthy heat wave and drought that struck Europe in the summer of 2003 stifled the growth of vegetation and thereby reduced the amount of carbon dioxide that the continent's plants extracted from the atmosphere.

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