Vol. 160 No. #9
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More Stories from the September 1, 2001 issue

  1. Animals

    Stinking decorations protect nests

    The common waxbill's habit of adorning its nests with fur plucked from carnivore scat turns out to discourage attacks from predators.

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  2. Animals

    Oops. New feathers turn out lousy

    Going to the trouble of molting doesn't really get rid of a bird's lice after all.

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  3. Animals

    When rare species eat endangered ones

    To cut down on their salmon smolt catch, Caspian terns were encouraged to move from one island to another in the Columbia River.

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  4. Animals

    Big woodpeckers trash others’ homes

    Pileated woodpeckers destroy in an afternoon the nesting cavities that take endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers 6 years to excavate.

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  5. Paleontology

    That’s no footprint, it’s got no toes

    The impressions near Isona, Spain, long thought to be fossilized dinosaur footprints may actually record the feeding behavior of stingrays.

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  6. Paleontology

    Completing a titan by getting a head

    When paleontologists unearthed the skeleton of a 70-million-year-old titanosaur in Madagascar in the late 1990s, they also recovered something that had been missing from previous such finds: a skull that matched the body.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Stem cell research marches on

    Cells from human embryos can be transformed into heart cells or insulin-secreting cells.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Healing the heart from within

    An unusual mouse strain can regenerate heart tissue when the organ is damaged.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Insulin lowers more than blood sugar

    Insulin may reduce inflammation and protect the heart.

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  10. Paleontology

    New fossil sheds light on dinosaurs’ diet

    Vestiges of soft tissue preserved in a 70-million-year-old Mongolian fossil suggest that some dinosaurs could have strained small bits of food from the water and mud of streams and ponds, just like some modern aquatic birds do.

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  11. Computing

    Computer paints a charged bioportrait

    By employing a novel computational strategy, researchers have mapped the electrical landscape of biological molecules made up of more than 1 million atoms.

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  12. Human Brains May Take Unique Turn

    Preliminary evidence indicates that the human brain may undergo a unique form of fetal development that facilitates the growth of brain areas involved in symbolic thought and language.

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  13. Animals

    It’s a snake! No, a fish. An octopus?

    An as-yet-unnamed species of octopus seems to be protecting itself by impersonating venomous animals from sea snakes to flatfish.

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  14. Health & Medicine

    Hindering glutamate slows rat brain cancer

    Compounds that inhibit the amino acid glutamate impede a form of brain cancer called glioma in rats.

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  15. Tech

    Crystal listens for telltale sounds of virus

    Scientists have built a device that can hear the movement of viral particles in fluids.

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  16. Tech

    Quantum bell rings to electron beat

    A new nanoscale transistor that parcels out electrons with metronome-like regularity has the potential to lead to designs for electronic noses and tiny devices inside of cell phones.

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  17. Health & Medicine

    Milk seems to guard against breast cancer

    Norwegian scientists have linked high milk consumption to low incidence of breast cancer.

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  18. Tech

    The Seeing Tongue

    Blind people can now use their tongues to see, albeit crudely, thanks to prototype technology that involves licking arrays of electrodes attached to video cameras.

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  19. Math

    Pi à la Mode

    A potential link between two disparate mathematical fields—number theory and chaotic dynamics—could lead to a proof that every digit of pi occurs with the same frequency.

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