Vol. 184 No. #3
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More Stories from the August 10, 2013 issue

  1. Health & Medicine

    Paralyzed rats relearn to pee

    Bladder control restored for the first time in animals with stark spinal cord damage.

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  2. Animals

    Honeybees use right antennae to tell friend from foe

    Asymmetry in sense of smell alters insects' behavior in lab tests.

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  3. Animals

    Gut microbes may put barrier between species

    Wiping out gut bacteria in wasps saves crossbred offspring from death, suggesting that microbes may play a role in speciation.

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  4. Animals

    Highlights from the Evolution 2013 meeting

    Selections from the meeting include a natural fish experiment, terrapins' light displays and why a variety of eye colors persist in people, presented June 21-25 in Snowbird, Utah.

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  5. Space

    Interstellar chemistry makes use of quantum shortcut

    Reactions in the frigid cold of space are sped by a quirk of physics, researchers propose.

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  6. Life

    Bacterial molecules may prevent inflammatory bowel disease

    Common compounds produced by gut microbes quench colitis in mice.

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  7. Planetary Science

    Gas, not planets, may be source of rings around stars

    Interactions between gas and dust may form elliptical patterns.

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  8. Physics

    Perfect mirror debuts

    Material that reflects light without letting any escape could improve lasers.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Four-question test ID’s women with depression

    Simple decision tool shows potential as quick way to identify clinical depression.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    What and when babies first eat may affect diabetes risk

    Children at risk of type 1 diabetes are better off waiting until 4 months of age to consume solid foods.

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  11. Chemistry

    Coatings have simple recipe for success

    Chemists encapsulate tiny objects using natural ingredients and easy, inexpensive process.

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  12. Life

    Gene therapy treats children with rare diseases

    Six kids are healthy, up to three years after treatment.

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  13. Earth

    Huge quakes may foretell smaller, human-caused ones

    Distant powerful temblors triggered ominous activity at wastewater injection sites.

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  14. Animals

    Fattened livers prep white sharks for extreme migrations

    The organ's reserves enable a long journey from waters off California to Hawaii and back, tracking data suggest.

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  15. Genetics

    Technique inactivates Down-causing chromosome

    Though far from a cure, the advance could eventually lead to gene therapy that alleviates some symptoms.

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  16. Tech

    Surgical tool smokes out cancer in seconds

    Sniffing for telltale molecules, method analyzes tissue with every cut.

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  17. Anthropology

    War arose recently, anthropologists contend

    Infrequent killings among hunter-gatherer groups fit a scenario of a largely peaceful Stone Age, a study concludes.

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  18. Physics

    Under magnet’s sway, fluids form simple structures

    Droplets wiggle, split and coalesce into simple and dynamic configurations.

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  19. Life

    Size isn’t only mystery of huge virus

    A strange replication method and an unusual genetic sequence are among the mysteries of the outsized Pandoravirus.

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  20. Environment

    Atomic ant sand

    Robb Hermes asked for sand ants to get samples of Trinitite, a material created in the test blasts of the first atomic bomb.

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  21. Neuroscience

    Brainwashed

    The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld.

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  22. Archaeology

    Notorious Bones

    South African finds enter fray over origins of the human genus.

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  23. Neuroscience

    The Anorexic Brain

    Neuroimaging improves understanding of eating disorder.

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  24. Letters to the editor

    Not-so-smart perception Researchers studying associations between IQ and selected visual tasks (“Less is more for smart perception,” SN: 6/29/13, p. 18) report that tracking small moving foreground objects, a task at which high-IQ subjects excelled, is often more important than detecting large-object motion or attending to background activity. They suggest that for driving or walking […]

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  25. Computing

    Forecasting by computer

    Excerpt from the August 10, 1963, issue of Science News Letter.

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  26. Genetics

    The Sports Gene

    Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein.

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