More Stories from the June 21, 2008 issue
- Humans
Butting out together
Cigarette smokers who know one another tend to kick the habit all at once, highlighting the importance of social forces in smoking-cessation treatment.
- Anthropology
They’re fake, Indy!
Scientists find that two rock crystal skulls often attributed to pre-Columbian societies are really modern phonies.
- Planetary Science
Touchdown! Phoenix lands on Mars
The first close-up color images of the northern arctic circle on the Red Planet were recorded by the Mars Phoenix Lander spacecraft only a few hours after its flawless descent at 7:38 p.m. EDT, May 25. The detailed images suggest ice lies beneath the hard soil.
- Health & Medicine
Tracking obesity
New data suggest that childhood obesity in the United States may have leveled off between 1999 and 2006.
- Life
Fly fountain of youth
Hanging out with young, healthy flies helps fruit flies with a mutation that causes neurodegeneration live longer.
- Paleontology
Walking tall
Some types of the largest flying reptiles ever known were well adapted to life on the ground.
- Health & Medicine
Lead’s legacy
High levels of lead in the blood during childhood are associated with smaller brains and with an increased risk for violent criminal behavior, report two new studies.
- Earth
Life down deep
Deep-sea sediments provide a habitat for diverse and abundant populations of microorganisms and may be home to as much as 70 percent of the bacteria on the planet, new studies suggest.
- Health & Medicine
Monkey think, robotic monkey arm do
In a step toward someday making brain-controlled prosthetic arms for people, scientists have trained monkeys to control a robotic arm with their thoughts. Click on the image to read the story and see the video.
- Archaeology
Domain of the dead
Researchers say that Stonehenge functioned as the largest cemetery of its time.
- Life
Tracing human roots
Using a new method of data analysis, researchers have found that the Americas were peopled in two different migrations.
- Planetary Science
Small exoplanet discovered
Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet known that is beyond the solar system and orbits an ordinary parent body.
- Space
Better view of the Milky Way
New studies revise the structure of the Milky Way, exchanging the old map of a four-armed spiral galaxy for a two-arm version. The makeover also includes the discovery of a smaller, short, gaseous arm that is a long-sought counterpart to a similar arm near the galaxy’s center.
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- Space
Sizing up black holes
ST. LOUIS—Astronomers are all wound up over a new method for sizing up supermassive black holes found at the cores of galaxies. The method allows researchers for the first time to estimate the weight of these black holes in spiral galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away, or halfway across the universe, reports Marc Seigar […]
- Health & Medicine
Nabbing suspicious SNPs
Scientists search the whole genome for clues to common diseases.
- Health & Medicine
Thanks for the future memories
To the brain, remembering the past and visualizing the future look surprisingly similar.
- Chemistry
Small, But Super
These 'atoms' can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, but they have special powers.
