Vol. 172 No. #24
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More Stories from the December 15, 2007 issue

  1. Health & Medicine

    Big kids at risk for heart disease

    Overweight children grow up to have an elevated risk for blocked coronary arteries as adults, a long-term Danish study finds.

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  2. Animals

    Female antelopes take the lead in courtship

    Topi antelopes, with their hesitant males, reverse the usual sex roles in mammal courtship.

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  3. Cell’s core pore structure solved

    Scientists working in yeast have deciphered the structure of the complex cluster of proteins that regulates access to the nucleus of cells.

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  4. Escaping flatland

    Growing cells in gelatinous materials gains in popularity as more researchers realize how the three-dimensional arrangement of cells influences cell behavior—and increases the relevance of experiments.

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  5. Cells’ innards may share origin

    Many of the internal structures of a cell may have evolved from an ancient, simpler compartment.

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  6. Anthropology

    Ancient Ailment? Early human may have carried tuberculosis

    A 500,000-year-old Homo erectus skull from Turkey may show telltale signs of tuberculosis, by far the earliest such evidence of the disease.

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  7. Humans

    A New Editor for Science News

    Science News welcomes a new Editor in Chief.

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  8. Animals

    Hatch a Thief: Brains incline birds toward a life of crime

    When it comes to a bird family's propensity to pilfer, a larger than usual brain for a particular body size is more important than body size alone.

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  9. Pulling Together: Mitotic ring self-assembly revealed

    A ring of proteins forms around the "waistlines" of cells to contract and split the cells in two, and scientists have now discovered how that ring self-assembles.

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  10. Astronomy

    Stellar Opposites: Sky survey reveals new halo of stars

    The Milky Way galaxy possesses a distinct outer halo that orbits in the opposite direction from its inner halo and the rest of the galaxy.

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  11. Astronomy

    Run of the Mill: Finding galactic building blocks in early universe

    Astronomers have discovered 27 faint, run-of-the-mill galaxies from the early universe that may be some of the building blocks of giant galaxies such as the Milky Way.

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  12. Physics

    Light Swell: Optical rogue waves resemble oceanic ones

    Signals in optical fibers can combine into rare, short-lived spikes that resemble oceanic rogue waves.

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  13. Ecosystems

    Prairie Revival

    Prairie restoration is attracting interest, but because so little long-term monitoring and comparative studies have been done, researchers are still wondering whether it's really possible to re-create a prairie.

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  14. Health & Medicine

    The Long Road to Beta Cells

    In their quest to cure type 1 diabetes, scientists are finding that turning stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells is a lot harder than it first appeared.

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  15. Humans

    Letters from the December 15, 2007, issue of Science News

    Fuzzy logic Astronomer Masanori Iye of the National Observatory of Japan blames the blurry appearance of meteor trails at about 100 kilometers altitude on the fact that they were photographed with telescopes focused at infinity (“Out-of-focus find,” SN: 9/29/07, p. 205). But optics teaches that any object much farther away than the focal length of […]

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