News
- Astronomy
Core mystery
Despite new images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the brightest known supernova of the past 400 years remains a puzzle for astronomers.
- Astronomy
Triple Play: A planet with three suns
Three suns grace the skies above a newly found, Jupiterlike extrasolar planet, posing a puzzle for how massive planets form in a closely-knit, multiple-star system.
- Physics
Realistic Time Machine? New design could forgo exotic ingredient
A novel time machine concept may avoid a problem of earlier, less-practical proposals by requiring only normal matter and the vacuum known to exist in space.
- Earth
Pollution Ups Blood Pressure: Inhaled particles linked to transient effect
In a laboratory setting, volunteers breathing pollutants generated by sources such as vehicle engines experience slight but steady increases in blood pressure.
- Earth
Arctic Foulers: Foraging seabirds carry contaminants home
When seabirds go out looking for food, they can bring home traces of pollutants that build up around their nesting colonies.
- Earth
Power-laden winds sweep North America
There's more than enough wind power to satisfy the United States' energy requirements, a new analysis of weather data suggests.
- Health & Medicine
Brain Power: Stem cells put a check on nerve disorders
Adult neural stem cells protect the brain against repeated episodes of inflammation in disorders such as multiple sclerosis by killing inflammatory immune cells.
- Health & Medicine
Cancer Switch: Good gene is shut off in various malignancies
A gene called Reprimo is shut down in several cancers but rarely in healthy cells.
- Health & Medicine
Codes for Killers: Knowledge of microbes could lead to cures
Scientists have deciphered the DNA of the parasites responsible for African sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease, and leishmaniasis.
- Tech
Wiring up molecules
Minuscule gaps of controlled sizes in gold microwires may serve as test sites for probing properties of specks of material as small as a single molecule and as a basis for novel sensors and circuit components.
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Hypnosis subdues the visual brain
Hypnotic suggestions to perceive written words as gibberish depress activity in brain areas responsible for vision, possibly reflecting a hypnosis-induced decline in attention paid to visual objects.
- Animals
Is eyeless sea creature fishing with a red light?
Researchers off the coast of California have captured three deep-water siphonophores, relatives of jellyfish, and observed in the lab that the creatures twitch little red lights that could be lures for fish.
