Vol. 174 No. #11
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More Stories from the November 22, 2008 issue

  1. Life

    Avian airlines: Alaska to New Zealand nonstop

    Tracked bar-tailed godwits break previous nonstop flight record for birds.

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  2. Animals

    Spider males good for mating, food

    Expectant mothers, including spiders, need to eat well. For Mediterranean tarantulas, a male suitor tastes just fine.

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  3. Neuroscience

    Selective memory

    Using genetic engineering and chemical manipulation, scientists erased the memory of a stressful experience from a mouse’s brain.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Closest look yet at lung cancer genes

    A large study offers clues to the genetics behind lung cancer.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Drug may offer MS turnaround

    A drug used against leukemia can ease disability in early-stage multiple sclerosis patients over a three-year span.

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  6. Archaeology

    Return of the kings

    Excavations in southern Jordan have incited controversy about whether a copper-producing society existed there 3,000 years ago, and whether it was controlled by Israeli kings described in the Old Testament.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Stopping rotavirus before it hits

    A vaccine against rotavirus shows potent protection against the diarrhea-causing pathogen in its first year of widespread use.

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  8. Astronomy

    Double the rubble: Nearby star system has two asteroid belts

    Epsilon Eridani hosts an inner asteroid belt and planet arranged like those in the solar system.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Fungal meningitis spreads in Pacific Northwest

    A fungus called Cryptococcus gattii that causes meningitis is slowly making its way down the North American West Coast.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Malaria takes on the top meds

    Malaria is thwarting frontline drugs called artemisinins in Cambodia.

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  11. Animals

    Farm chemicals can indirectly hammer frogs

    A widely used agricultural weed killer teams up with fertilizer to render frogs especially vulnerable to debilitating parasites.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    A sugar helps E. coli go down

    Some harmful strains of E. coli might rely on something sweet to do harm.

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  13. Chemistry

    Oldest evidence for complex life in doubt

    Chemical biomarkers in ancient Australian rocks, once thought to be the oldest known evidence of complex life on Earth, may have infiltrated long after the sediments were laid down, new analyses suggest.

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  14. Health & Medicine

    Itch

    When it comes to sensory information detected by the body, pain is king, and itch is the court jester. But that insistent, tingly feeling—satisfied only by a scratch—is anything but funny to the millions of people who suffer from it chronically.

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  15. Space

    Half-life (more or less)

    Physicists are stirred by claims that the sun may change what’s unchangeable—the rate of radioactive decay.

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  16. Chemistry

    Silk

    Mimicking how spiders make their complex array of silks could usher in a tapestry of new materials, and other animals or plants could be designed to be the producers.

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