More Stories from the December 17, 2005 issue
- Earth
Microbe polishes off pollutant
Researchers have determined how long a pesticide residue would remain in the environment if the microbe Pseudomonas pavonaceae didn't metabolize it.
- Astronomy
Dark shadows
New radio telescope images of the center of the Milky Way make an even more compelling case that a supermassive black hole resides there.
- Health & Medicine
New software aids virtual colonoscopy
A computer program helps radiologists spot dangerous growths in the colon without probing inside the body.
- Health & Medicine
Shots often don’t reach muscle
Standard 3-centimeter needles are too short to penetrate the layer of fat in the buttocks of most women and most obese men, so injected medications aimed at muscle often don't reach their targets.
- Earth
Glacial Change: Greenland’s ice loss doubled in 2005
A host of observations suggests that Greenland's ice sheet diminished this year at a rate more than twice that seen just a few years ago.
- Earth
TB Dilemma: Badger refugees complicate culling
Two new analyses bring an ironic twist to the heated debate over whether badgers in Britain should be killed to prevent them from spreading tuberculosis among cattle.
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Shades of Flesh Tone: Tests reveal gene for people’s skin color
Researchers have identified a gene that they propose plays a major role in determining a person's skin color.
- Tech
Reaction in Hand: Microreactor produces radioactive probe in a jiffy
A miniature chemical reactor that whips up a diagnostic tool could widen the availability of positron-emission tomography (PET) scans.
- Astronomy
Cosmic Expansion: Supernovas shed light on dark energy
A new study of light from supernovas provides additional hints that dark energy, the mysterious entity revving up the expansion of the universe, might be distributed uniformly throughout space and time.
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Brain Training Puts Big Hurt on Intense Pain: Volunteers learn to translate imaging data into neural-control tool
Using brain-imaging technology, researchers have trained people to control activity in a pain-related brain area by using mental techniques, thus enabling them to reduce the intensity of temporary or chronic pain.
- Health & Medicine
Tomorrow’s Clot Stoppers? New anticoagulants show promise
Two experimental drugs could become alternatives to warfarin and a class of other products that are used widely to protect against potentially fatal blood clots.
- Physics
Peek-a-bubble
Physicists made a stable, doughnut-shaped air bubble in water by encasing the gas ring in beads that form a stiff shell.
- Math
Surface Story
Mathematicians have zeroed in on a new type of minimal surface based on a double helix.
- Earth
Changes in the Air
Changes in the atmospheric concentration of oxygen through geologic time, some gradual and some drastic, have strongly shaped evolution among many types of creatures.
- Humans
Letters from the December 17, 2005, issue of Science News
C plus Ewan Cameron, who in 1971 began to collaborate with Linus Pauling on vitamin C and cancer, typically initiated patients with 10 grams per day of vitamin C given intravenously for about 2 weeks, followed by an oral dosage continued indefinitely. The two Mayo Clinic trials referred to in “Vitamin C may treat cancer […]
