Vol. 170 No. #9
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More Stories from the August 26, 2006 issue

  1. Astronomy

    Cosmic bigness

    Astronomers have found the largest structures ever discovered in the universe.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Sauna use among dads linked to tumors in children

    Men who expose themselves to excessive heat in the weeks before they conceive children may place their future offspring at unnecessary risk of brain cancer.

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  3. Chemistry

    Protection from poisons

    An Alzheimer's disease drug could be protective against the deadly effects of two nerve agents.

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  4. Stress rate revised for Vietnam vets

    A reanalysis of data from a 1988 study of Vietnam veterans finds that 19 percent developed war-related post-traumatic stress disorder, a smaller proportion than had previously been estimated.

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  5. Unusual tumor is contagious in dogs

    A type of cancer in dogs is transferred from animal to animal by exchange of cancer cells.

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  6. Tech

    The ups and downs of routing fluids on chips

    A new way to build microscale pipes in three dimensions boosts the sophistication of chips that manipulate fluids to perform chemical reactions and other tasks.

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  7. Placebo predictions

    Giving patients placebo pills for a week before they begin to participate in trials of antidepressants can help clinicians gauge how well they will respond to the actual medication.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Breast milk may not be enough

    Breast-fed infants need vitamin D supplements, at least in winter.

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  9. Astronomy

    Enlightened: Dark matter spotted after cosmic crash

    In the aftermath of a cosmic crash between two galaxies, researchers say they've detected invisible dark matter for the first time.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Risky Legacy: African DNA linked to prostate cancer

    The high rate of prostate cancer among African American men may result in large part from a newly identified stretch of DNA passed down from their African ancestors.

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  11. Math

    Fields Medals: Mathematicians win awards for geometry, physics, and probability

    Fields Medals have been awarded to four mathematicians, including Grigori Perelman, who proved a famous conjecture about the shapes of higher-dimensional spheres.

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  12. Sweet Finding: Researchers propose candidate sour sensor

    A protein on the surfaces of select tongue cells may play a pivotal role in detecting sour taste.

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  13. Animals

    Underage Spiders: Males show unexpected interest in young mates

    Male Australian redback spiders mate readily with females too young to have external openings to their reproductive tracts, a tactic that reduces the male's risk of getting cannibalized.

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  14. Chemistry

    Lacy molecular order

    A lacy honeycomb arrangement of molecules on copper suggests the possibility of creating useful nanoscale patterns on surfaces by fine-tuning intermolecular forces.

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  15. Pathogen Preference: Infected amoebas flourish in cooling towers

    Cooling towers appear to be more effective than natural waters at fostering novel bacterial species that cause illnesses in people.

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  16. Earth

    Mercury Rising: Natural wildfires release pollutant

    Fires in high-latitude forests and peaty soils of the Northern Hemisphere may loft hundreds of tons of mercury into the atmosphere each year.

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  17. Humans

    Mutant Maps

    Struck by an analogy between genetic mutations and flaws in antique printed documents, a biologist has devised a method to analyze such flaws to pinpoint publication dates of rare, undated documents.

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  18. Paleontology

    Bone Hunt

    Science News reporter Sid Perkins recounts the trials and tribulations of digging for dinosaurs in central Montana.

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  19. Humans

    Letters from the August 26, 2006, issue of Science News

    Dust to dust In “Not a planet?” (SN: 6/17/06, p. 382), Alycia Weinberger says, “The discovery of a disk around the planetary-mass companion to 2M1207 should be a bit of a relief to planet-formation theorists” because it casts doubt on the object being a planet. But wouldn’t our early solar system have been composed of […]

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