Vol. 165 No. #7
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More Stories from the February 14, 2004 issue

  1. Bacteria do the twist

    A newly identified bacterial protein generates the sinuous shapes of some bacteria.

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  2. Astronomy

    Poof goes an atmosphere

    Blasted by the heat and radiation from its parent star, a planet 150 light-years from Earth is literally blowing off its atmosphere.

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  3. Monkeys heed neural calls of the wild

    A part of the brain that's involved in sound processing shows pronounced activity when rhesus monkeys hear their comrades vocalizing but not when the same animals hear other sounds.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Virus might explain respiratory ailments

    Human metapneumovirus, first isolated in 2001, is present in many respiratory infections that had previously gone unexplained.

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  5. Animals

    How blind mole rats find their way home

    The blind mole rat is the first animal discovered to navigate by combining dead reckoning with a magnetic compass.

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  6. Earth

    Ancient whalers altered arctic lakes

    Analyses of sediment and water samples taken from an arctic lake indicate that an ancient whaling community left a mark on the lake’s ecosystem that persists today, even though the settlement was abandoned more than 400 years ago.

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  7. Anthropology

    European find gets Stone Age date

    A new radiocarbon analysis indicates that a skeleton found more than a century ago in an Italian cave dates to around 26,400 to 23,200 years ago.

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  8. Tailoring Therapies: Cloned human embryo provides stem cells

    Scientists have for the first time carried test-tube cloning of a human embryo to the stage at which it can yield stem cells.

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  9. Tech

    Snappy DNA: Long strand folds into octahedron

    By harnessing the self-assembling properties of DNA, researchers coerced a single strand of the genetic material to assume the shape of an octahedron.

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  10. Paleontology

    Early Flight? Winged insects appear surprisingly ancient

    New analyses of a fossil suggest that winged insects may have emerged as early as 400 million years ago.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Pregnancy Alert: Proteins may predict preeclampsia

    Blood concentrations of two proteins that affect blood vessel growth appear to foretell the pregnancy condition known as preeclampsia.

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  12. Anthropology

    Some Primates’ Sheltered Lives: Baboons, chimps enter the realm of cave

    In separate studies, researchers have gathered the first systematic evidence showing that baboons and chimpanzees regularly use caves, a behavior many anthropologists have attributed only to people and our direct ancestors.

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  13. Animals

    Flesh Eaters: Bees that strip carrion also take wasp young

    A South American bee that ignores flowers and collects carrion from carcasses has an unexpected taste for live, abandoned wasp young.

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  14. Physics

    Candy Science: M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres

    Squashed or stretched versions of spheres snuggle together more tightly than randomly packed spheres do.

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  15. Animals

    Where’d I Put That?

    Birds that hide and recover thousands of separate caches of seeds have become a model for investigating how animals' minds work.

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  16. Code Breakers

    Chemical tags applied to proteins that DNA wraps around regulate genetic activity.

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  17. Tech

    Diagnosing the Developing World

    Researchers are learning how to adapt sophisticated technologies to meet the health-care needs of the developing world.

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  18. Humans

    Letters from the Feb. 14, 2004, issue of Science News

    Revealing words “Bookish Math: Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries” (SN: 12/20&27/03, p. 392: Bookish Math) skipped one of the most significant methods for analyzing text for authorship. On March 11, 1887, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall reported in Science a straightforward method of plotting word length versus frequency. The beauty of this method is that […]

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