More Stories from the August 6, 2005 issue
- Earth
Great river cycles carbon quickly
Some of the organic material carried to the sea by the Amazon is thousands of years old, but much of the carbon in carbon dioxide emanating from the river was stored in plants for less than a decade.
-
Human immune signal sets off bacterial attack
A chemical secreted by immune cells when people are stressed or sick causes a common gut bacterium to go on the offensive against its host.
- Health & Medicine
Lyme microbe forms convenient bond with tick protein
The bacterium that causes Lyme disease commandeers a gene in the deer tick, inducing overproduction of a salivary protein that the bacterium uses to escape immune detection once it's inside a mammal.
-
Bacteria feed on stinky breath
Scientists have isolated mouth bacteria that consume the chemicals that cause bad breath.
- Health & Medicine
King George III should have sued
The madness of England's King George III may have been partly due to arsenic poisoning.
- Earth
Hurricanes get boost from ocean spray
A new model that describes airflow across the ocean's surface suggests that tiny droplets whipped from the tops of waves increase wind speeds well above what they'd be if the ocean spray wasn't there.
- Earth
Life thrived below solid ice shelf
A survey of a segment of Antarctic seafloor that until recently had laid beneath a thick, floating ice shelf for thousands of years has revealed an ecosystem apparently based on chemical nourishment, not sunshine.
-
Double Dog: Researchers produce first cloned canine
The dogged pursuit of a South Korean research team has produced Snuppy, the world's first cloned canine.
- Planetary Science
Bigger than Pluto: Tenth planet or icy leftover?
Astronomers have found a body larger and more distant than Pluto, the biggest object found in the solar system since Neptune and its moon Triton were discovered in 1846.
- Health & Medicine
From Famine, Schizophrenia: Starvation gives birth to personality disorder
Women who go severely hungry during early pregnancy face twice the normal risk of having a child who develops schizophrenia in adulthood.
- Earth
Multifaceted Mineral: Intense heat, pressure bear new form of silica
By squeezing a mineral sample to pressures higher than those deep within Earth, then zapping it with a laser, scientists have created a crystalline form of silicon dioxide previously unknown on Earth.
- Health & Medicine
Virus Attack on Cancer: Heat makes neglected technology work better
Adding heat sensitizes tumor cells to the effects of a genetically modified virus, which then can kill them.
- Tech
Speed Reader: Gene sequencing gets a boost
The first lab-ready technology to challenge the dominant gene-sequencing technique known as the Sanger method taps miniaturization and parallel reading of hundreds of thousands of DNA stretches to boost speed and slash cost.
- Humans
Space Woes: NASA programs reel from shuttle problems
Technological problems for NASA's space shuttle Discovery, such as falling foam and dangling insulation, are causing safety worries and throwing a crimp into the U.S. space program.
- Tech
Easy Striders
New robots based on the mechanics of human walking use less energy and move more naturally than traditional bipedal robots do, suggesting new ways to approach two-legged robots and prosthetic design.
- Anthropology
The Human Wave
Anatomically modern people evolved in small groups of ancient Homo sapiens that never traveled too far but continually interbred with nearby groups, including other Homo species, creating a genetic wave that moved from Africa across Asia, a new model suggests.
- Humans
Letters from the August 6, 2005, issue of Science News
Empty threat? “Empty Nets: Fisheries may be crippling themselves by targeting the big ones” (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360) reads as if there is something to be alarmed about. By selectively catching large fish, we have reduced “the mean size [of food fish to] one-fifth of what it was.” This is not cause for alarm. It […]
