Uncategorized
- Life
A gland grows itself
Japanese researchers coax a pituitary to develop from stem cells in a lab dish.
- Life
Prehistoric horses came in leopard print
Dappled animals, once thought to be the result of selective breeding after domestication, were around when early humans depicted them on cave walls.
- Life
School rules
Fish coordinate with one, or perhaps two, of their neighbors to make group travel a swimming success.
- Paleontology
DNA suggests North American mammoth species interbred
Supposedly separate types may really have been one.
- Life
Giant beavers had hidden vocal talents
With air passageways in its skull like no other animal known, an extinct outsized rodent may have made sound all its own.
- Psychology
Skateboarders rock physics
Skateboarding develops intuition about slope speeds unavailable to most people.
- Psychology
‘Gorilla man’ goes unheard
Paying attention to what others say can make listeners totally unaware of unexpected sounds.
- Space
Atom & Cosmos
An asteroid's star turn, a 520-day mission to nowhere and the brightest millisecond pulsar ever.
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Love affair with statistics gives science a significant problem
Scientists love statistical significance. It offers a way to test hypotheses. It’s a ticket to publishing, to media coverage, to tenure. It’s also a crock — statistically speaking, anyway. You know the idea. When scientists perform an experiment and their data suggest an important result — say, that watching TV causes influenza — there’s always the nagging concern that the finding […]
- Health & Medicine
First brain image of a dream created
Feat opens the door to probing the stuff of nocturnal dramas.
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Cornell project brings peregrines back to the eastern United States
With a little help, peregrine falcons make a comeback from the devastating effects of DDT.
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Letters
Defining the human species Having read “Humans benefited by interbreeding” (SN: 10/8/11, p. 13), I wonder if I have missed what, to me, seems a major change in the definition of “species.” I was taught that the attempted crossbreeding of animals of two different species could result in either no offspring or sterile offspring. If […]
