Vol. 157 No. #6
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More Stories from the February 5, 2000 issue

  1. Humans

    Treaty Nears on Gene-Altered Exports

    In an effort to help preserve biodiversity, negotiators from 130 nations crafted rules of conduct for international trade in living, genetically engineered organisms.

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  2. Anthropology

    Drowned land holds clue to first Americans

    A map of a now-flooded region charts the path that Asians may have taken to first reach the Americas.

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  3. Physics

    Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms

    Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset

    Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.

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  5. Earth

    DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers

    Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.

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  6. Animals

    Bees log flight distances, train with maps

    After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.

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  7. Astronomy

    Milky Way gets a new layer

    Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.

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  8. Keys to expertise in the brain

    A brain region linked to face recognition may foster expertise at identifying items in any category a person strives to master.

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  9. Dendrite decline in schizophrenia

    Cell connections in a part of the brain's frontal lobe appear to dwindle in people with schizophrenia.

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  10. Plants

    Why tulips can’t dance

    An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.

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  11. Ecosystems

    Males live longer with all-year mating

    Male butterflies live longer in Madeira, where females are available year-round, than in Sweden, where females mature in one burst.

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  12. Earth

    Just how much do U.S. roads matter?

    A Harvard researcher calculates that roads directly influence the ecology of a fifth of U.S. land area.

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  13. Health & Medicine

    Lung cancer gene has gender bias

    The X chromosome's gastrin-releasing peptide receptor gene is turned on by nicotine to produce a protein that promotes lung cancer, a combination of factors that could explain why women are more susceptible to the disease than men are.

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  14. Health & Medicine

    No worry that this secret will leak

    The recently discovered protein angiopoietin-1 appears to protect blood vessels from leaking, a finding with implications for research into diseases that involve swelling, such as arthritis and asthma.

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  15. Materials Science

    Vision Quest

    Increasing numbers of people with less-than-perfect vision can now wear contact lenses, thanks to innovations in lens design and materials.

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  16. Animals

    When Ants Squeak

    In the past 20 years, researchers studying sound communication in ants have discovered a sort of ant-ernet, zinging with messages about lost relatives, great food, free rides for hitchhikers, caterpillars in search of ant partners, and impending doom.

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