More Stories from the January 17, 2004 issue
- Tech
Electronic skin senses touch
A pressure-detecting membrane laminated onto a sheet of flexible plastic electronics may lead to artificial skin for robots.
- Health & Medicine
Could refrigeration explain Crohn’s rise?
Crohn's disease, marked by inflammation of the small intestine, could be caused by refrigeration of meats, a process that selects for hardy bacteria that handle cold temperatures well, researchers hypothesize.
- Earth
This pollutant fights lupus
A hormone-mimicking pollutant that leaches out of some plastics appears to fight lupus.
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Human genes take evolutionary turns
Researchers have identified a set of genes that has evolved an extensive pattern of alterations unique to people.
- Physics
Light pulse hovers in atom capsule
A new way to freeze light pulses in midflight preserves the pulses' optical energy and may eventually lead to using stationary light in optical circuits and quantum computers.
- Materials Science
Nanowires grow on viral templates
Researchers are using viruses to assemble semiconducting nanowires—the building blocks of future electronic circuits.
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Dog personality: His master’s traits
Personality traits may vary as much from one dog to another as they do from one person to another, a new study suggests.
- Tech
Tapping sun’s light and heat to make hydrogen
Researchers have demonstrated a highly efficient means of splitting water molecules to generate hydrogen fuel.
- Physics
A Solid Like No Other: Frigid, solid helium streams like a liquid
Frozen helium prepared in a laboratory has apparently transformed into a superfluid solid, or supersolid—a never-before-seen phase of matter that theorists predicted more than 30 years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Clear Airways: Quelling a protein stops mucus overload
By interfering with a protein that earlier research implicated in mucus secretion, scientists have countered overstimulation of mucus secretion in the airways of mice.
- Astronomy
Astronomy: Man Bites Dog; Planet heats its star
Observing a sunlike star 90 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found evidence of a closely orbiting planet heating its star.
- Materials Science
Marine Superglue: Mussels get stickiness from iron in seawater
The secret behind the binding power of mussel glue lies in iron extracted from seawater.
- Earth
Bogged Down: Ancient peat may be missing methane source
Massive peat bogs in Russia may have been a major source of atmospheric methane just after the end of the last ice age.
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9/11’s Fatal Road Toll: Terror attacks presaged rise in U.S. car deaths
Federal data indicate that fear of flying after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks caused a second toll of lives on U.S. roads in the last three months of that year.
- Animals
Cheap Taste? Bowerbirds go for bargain decor
When male spotted bowerbirds collect sticks and other doodads to wow females, they don't search for the rare showpiece but go for the cheap trinket.
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When to Change Sex
A research team contends that animals that routinely change sex, even those prompted by mate loss or other social cues, tend to do so when they reach 72 percent of their maximum size.
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Fear Not
Scientists find that facing your fears enables you to suppress them.
