More Stories from the December 6, 2008 issue
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ArchaeologyAn ancient healer reborn
A research team in Israel has uncovered one of the oldest known graves of a shaman. The 12,000-year-old grave hosts a woman’s skeleton surrounded by the remains of unusual animals.
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Humans
Food allergy advice may be peanuts
Early exposure to peanuts in a baby’s diet seems to lessen the risk of developing a peanut allergy later.
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Chemistry
Household cleaner makes blood removal simple!
Common household “oxy” cleaners remove blood almost too well.
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Chemistry
Blueprint to repel oil and water
The texture of surfaces could be designed so that both water and oil can bead up and thus flow off.
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Health & Medicine
Mini heart attack best treated like the big one
Patients admitted to hospitals with mild symptoms of a heart attack may benefit from getting a heart catheterization performed promptly.
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Health & Medicine
Treating viral heart infections
Viral heart infections respond to interferon treatment, easing cardiomyopathy in some patients.
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Earth
Minerals evolved along with life
Turns out, the variety and number of minerals in the solar system and on Earth have increased through time, and some minerals exist because Earth has life.
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Physics
Take the time to break quantum encryption
A time-travel scenario permitted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity offers a bit of possibility for breaking quantum encryption.
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Space
Extrasolar planetary system makes pictorial debut
The first images of a planetary system beyond the solar system are released, while the Hubble Space Telescope snaps a shot of likely planet orbiting a nearby star.
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Life
Stone Age gal gets hip
Researchers have found an approximately 1-million-year-old fossil pelvis that, in their view, indicates that Homo erectus females gave birth to surprisingly big-brained babies.
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Health & Medicine
Diversity of human skin bacteria revealed
First large-scale inventory of microbes charts types, locales of bacteria.
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Space
Misplaced muons either mundane or monumental
During an experiment in Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator, a group of elementary particles called muons showed up in a strange place. Physicists are considering the likely implications.
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Health & Medicine
Still crazy (in love) after all these years
A brain imaging study reveals that some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage.
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Psychology
Your body is mine
Scientists have developed a technique for inducing an illusion of having swapped one’s own body with someone else’s body, providing a new means for investigating self-identity and body-image disorders.
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Sequencing the dead to save the living
Genes tell stories of disease, of health, of parentage, all recorded in the chemical composition of DNA. But to many biologists, one of the most exciting tales that sequences of DNA letters can tell is an evolutionary one. And since evolution on its largest scale—the shifting cast of organisms populating Earth over the past few […]
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No gene is an island
The gene p53 has long been singled out as an anticancer hero. It is a critical tumor fighter. A person or lab animal develops a tumor much faster without the gene than with it. THE NETWORK | The diagram above outlines just a portion of the network that regulates genes in a sea urchin embryo. […]
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The decider
Informing the debate over the reality of ‘free will’ requires learning something about the lateral habenula Kurt Stier/Corbis At the end of The Matrix trilogy, Neo and Agent Smith are engaged in one final, interminable scene of surreal combat, a surrogate competition for an eternal battle between humans and machines. “It’s pointless to keep fighting,” […]