More Stories from the March 4, 2000 issue
- Archaeology
Ancient Asian Tools Crossed the Line
Excavations in China yield surprising finds of 800,000-year-old stone hand axes.
- Earth
Recent heat may indicate faster warming
A new analysis of temperature records indicates that global warming may be picking up its pace.
- Health & Medicine
Fused cells hold promise of cancer vaccines
A vaccine composed of tumor cells fused to immune cells has helped several people survive advanced kidney cancer.
- Materials Science
Foamy polymers hit goal right on the nose
Biodegradable polymer foams made with a new technique can act as scaffolds for regenerating tissues that may someday be used as replacement body parts.
- Health & Medicine
Antibodies fight Ebola virus in mouse test
Specially designed antibodies can thwart Ebola virus in mice by binding to a glycoprotein on the surface of virus-infected cells, suggesting a potential treatment for the lethal disease.
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Bt broccoli test: Refuges cut pest resistance
The first field test of a strategy for controlling insect resistance in a crop engineered to carry genes from the pesticide-producing bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis confirms the value of refuges in which some insects live without pesticide exposure.
- Physics
Glass may magnify ultrasmall-world oddities
A puzzling and unexpected response to magnetic fields suggests that certain glasses may exhibit a type of large-scale quantum mechanical behavior never seen before.
- Astronomy
Tidal tails tell tales of newborn galaxies
Some streams of gas and dust ripped out of large galaxies appear to form their own galaxies and may provide astronomers with a close-up view of galaxy formation.
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Glacial warming’s pollutant threat
Some Arctic wildlife are being exposed to high amounts of toxic wastes as glacial melting releases pollutants that had been buried in ice for decades.
- Agriculture
Sprawling over croplands
Satellite imagery indicates that sprawling urban development has been disproportionately gobbling up those lands best able to support crops.
- Physics
Electron spins pass imposing frontier
Electron spins crossed from one semiconductor to another with apparent ease and little or no mussing of their direction, suggesting that sandwiches of materials common in microcircuits are no obstacle to creating spin-information channels in future circuits.
- Chemistry
Rooting for new antimicrobial drugs
A compound from a tree found throughout tropical Africa could prove useful as a topical antifungal medication.
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Is that salamander virus flying?
Scientists searching for the carrier of the iridovirus causing a salamander disease have dismissed frogs and fish, but not birds.
- Astronomy
No signal from Mars Polar Lander
A radio signal that NASA hoped came from the vanished Mars Polar Lander has a terrestrial origin, scientists from the space agency and Stanford University have concluded.
- Astronomy
Super fireworks
A blast wave from supernova 1987A, the brightest stellar explosion witnessed from Earth since 1604, has begun lighting up a ring of gas surrounding the explosion.
- Math
Great Computations
From sifting through radio telescope signals for signs of extraterrestrial life to searching for record-breaking prime numbers, home and office computers contribute via the Internet to a variety of research efforts.
- Astronomy
Getting a Clear View
Outfitted with a mirror that flexes several hundred times a second to compensate for the blurring induced by Earth’s atmosphere, one of the world’s sharpest telescopes just got a whole lot sharper.
