Vol. 174 No. #13
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More Stories from the December 20, 2008 issue

  1. Life

    Schools make fish smarter

    A study of consensus decision making shows that sticklebacks make wider choices in groups of three or more.

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  2. Animals

    Forensics’ next tool: Hair-collecting caterpillars

    First human DNA extraction from hair bits in moth larval case.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Ginkgo biloba fails drug test

    The herbal supplement Ginkgo biloba fails to prevent Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia, a large trial finds.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Sleep makes room for memories

    Sleep erases old memories to make way for new learning

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  5. Physics

    Superconductivity does the twist

    Electron fluctuations could explain why exotic material conducts without resistance.

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  6. Space

    Water-ice deposits found beneath Martian hills

    Using radar from an orbiting spacecraft to penetrate the hidden recesses of Mars, planetary prospectors have uncovered vast reserves of water-ice buried beneath rocky debris.

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  7. Physics

    Standard model gets right answer for proton, neutron masses

    Correct calculation strengthens theory of quark-gluon interactions in nuclear particles.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Many drug trials never see publication

    Results of most drug trials are unreported, inaccessible to clinicians and patients, a new study confirms.

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  9. Humans

    Baby boys may show spatial supremacy

    Two new studies suggest that, at 3 to 5 months of age, boys already outperform girls on mental rotation tasks.

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  10. Earth

    Antidepressants make for sad fish

    Fish may suffer substantially from even brief encounters with antidepressants, which wastewater releases into river water.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Honeybee CSI: Why dead bodies can’t be found

    Virus could explain one symptom of colony collapse.

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  12. Ecosystems

    Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton

    HarperCollins, 2008, 460 p., $28.95.

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  13. Science & Society

    Book Review: Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine by Gary Paul Nabhan

    Review by Janet Raloff.

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  14. Life

    Protect biodiversity hot spots and the rest will follow

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  15. Earth

    The Hunt for Habitable Planets

    Here and now, a new suite of small telescopes are poised to look for Earthlike planets beyond the solar system.

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  16. Physics

    Physicists Hot for Ultracold

    Physicists have recently coaxed molecules into ultracold states in which motion is nearly gone.

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  17. Health & Medicine

    Imagination Medicine

    Brain imaging reveals the substance of placebos. Expectation alone triggers the same neural circuits and chemicals as real drugs.

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  18. Letters

    NASA’s source In “Cooling climate ‘consensus’ of 1970s never was” (SN: 10/25/08, p. 5), Science News includes a graph, attributed to NASA, that shows temperature deviations from the year 1880. The data clearly indicate a distinct warming trend throughout the period. Why is it that over the past two years I have very painstakingly researched […]

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  19. Astronomy

    Stargazing Basics: Getting Started in Recreational Astronomy by Paul E. Kinzer

    Cambridge Univ., 2008, 147 p., $19.99.

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