Science News articles from April 2004

Science News archives from April 2004

Nanoscale materials damage fish brains.(Tiny Trouble)
April 3, 2004... In the field of nanotechnology, small might be better, but it's not necessarily safe. Biologists have found that a type of nanomaterial called buckyballs can damage brain cells in fish. Buckyballs are one of the many nanomaterials that...

The lab rat bares its DNA to biologists.(Devil's Lapdog Gets Its Due)
April 3, 2004... Overshadowed in scientific circles for the past few decades by its smallish cousin the mouse, the rat is back in the limelight. This week, biologists announced that they have deciphered the full DNA sequence of the standard lab rat, setting the...

Selection in action: attacks favor spike length for lizards.(Long Horns Win)
April 3, 2004... A quirk in a bird's hunting behavior has given scientists a rare chance to measure an evolutionary force in action in the wild. When a loggerhead shrike catches a lizard, the bird often impales it on a thorn or a spur of barbed wire and...

Foreskin may permit HIV entry, infection.(Better-Off Circumcised?)
April 3, 2004... Circumcision seems to arm men with a degree of protection against HIV, the AIDS virus, but the mechanism underlying this defense has been unclear. A new study bolsters earlier reports implicating the foreskin of the penis as one of HIV's...

Andromeda's dining habits are documented.(Foraging among the Galaxies)
April 3, 2004... Once a cannibal, always a cannibal. A new survey is adding to the evidence that Andromeda, the Milky Way's sister galaxy, has not only grown bigger in the past by feasting on smaller galaxies, but is continuing to do so. In...

Long-sought technology finally propels a plane.(Soaring at Hyperspeed)
April 3, 2004... Traveling 29,000 meters above Earth, a small unmanned craft last week became the first airplane to fly powered by an exotic type of engine known as a scramjet. The wedge-shaped vehicle, called an X-43A or Hyper-X, separated from its booster...

Genes hint that ferns proliferated in shade of flowering plants.(A Frond Fared Well)
April 3, 2004... Analyses of genetic material from a multitude of fern species suggest that much of that plant group branched out millions of years after flowering plants appeared, a notion that contradicts many scientists' views of plant evolution. ...

All roads lead to RUNX: several autoimmune diseases share one bad actor.
April 3, 2004... "On a good day, it feels like you,re trying to move through a pool of Jell-O." That's how Venetia Thompson of Middletown, Del., describes the exhaustion that she's known most of her life. There have also been periodic headaches and,...

Monkey business: do the quirks of capuchins make them creatures with culture?(Cover Story)
April 3, 2004... It's not easy keeping up with pint-size monkeys in the jungle. The teams of researchers who've been doing it for the past 14 years have had to put up with a lot: barreling face-first into spider webs before sunrise, hacking through dense,...

Microbes craft unusual crystals.(Microbiology)
April 3, 2004... In the flooded tunnels of an abandoned iron mine below the town of Tennyson, Wis., scuba divers recently retrieved a curious community of bacteria that grow bizarre, hairlike crystals. "The crystals look like tangled spaghetti," says earth...

Phthalate exposure from drugs?(Biomedicine)
April 3, 2004... A regimen of prescription pills may explain the highest blood concentration of a phthalate ever observed, medical researchers say. Phthalates are used as solvents, in plastics formulations, and for other purposes. Last year, Russ Hauser of...

New U.N. treaty on toxic exports.(Environment)(Brief Article)
April 3, 2004... It's taken more than 5 years, but on Feb. 24, the Rotterdam Convention--an agreement governing trade in a specified list of hazardous chemicals and pesticides--was finally ratified by enough nations to become a United Nations treaty. Most...

Suppressed thoughts rebound in dreams.(Psychology)(Brief Article)
April 3, 2004... Try not to think about a white bear and suddenly there it is, haunting your thoughts. A new studyindicates that attempting to suppress specific thoughts also has a delayed effect by bringing them out in dreams. The findings elaborate on...

Medieval cure-all may actually have spread disease.(Infectious Disease)
April 3, 2004... One of medieval Europe's most popular concoctions for treating disease might instead have been an agent of germ transmission, new research suggests. In the Middle Ages, merchants in apothecaries often dispensed mumia, or bitumen, a black,...

Laser scanners map rock art.(Archaeology)
April 3, 2004... Researchers have developed a way to use laser-based surveying instruments to create detailed images of ancient etchings on stone. The new technique, which provides far more information than photographs do, could enable archaeologists to quickly...

Night space images show development.(Science And Society)
April 3, 2004... For many emergency-management officials, monitoring the rapid pace of development in fire-prone regions of the western United States is a daunting task. Now, scientists may have come up with a means to estimate population growth in these areas...

The Curious Life Of Robert Hooke: the Man Who Measured London.(Book Review)
April 3, 2004... THE CURIOUS LIFE OF ROBERT HOOKE: The Man Who Measured London LISA JARDINE In a meticulously researched effort, Jardine paints an emotional yet honest portrait of Robert Hooke, one of the 1600s most enigmatic, although largely...

Investigative Pathways: Patterns and Stages in the Careers of Experimental Scientists.(Book Review)
April 3, 2004... INVESTIGATIVE PATHWAYS: Patterns and stages In the Careers of Experimental Scientists FREDERIC LAWRENCE HOLMES This book investigates scientific creativity by examining the laboratory notebooks and other indicators of the thinking of a...

Red Sky At Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.(Book Review)
April 3, 2004... RED SKY AT MORNING: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment JAMES GUSTAVE SPETH Speth, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University and former advisor to two presidents, reports on the state of...

Reliable Roses: Easy-to-Grow Roses That Won't Let You Down.(Book Review)
April 3, 2004... RELIABLE ROSES: Easy-to-Grow Roses That Won't Let You Down PHILIP HARKNESS Many gardeners believe that roses are tough to grow and make bloom. Harkness argues that people's intimidation by these flowers is unjustified. He thinks people...

Tears Of The Cheetah: And Other Tales from the Genetic Frontier.(Book Review)
April 3, 2004... TEARS OF THE CHEETAH: And Other Tales from the Genetic Frontier STEPHEN J. O'BRIEN At the Laboratory of Genetic Diversity at the National Institutes of Health, O'Brien and his team are chasing down causes and cures for human diseases...

Lack of data?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 3, 2004... Something jumped out at me from "Tell-tale Charts: Is anticipating heart disease as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4?" (SN: 1/31/04, p. 72). It's that there were no published data supporting the 50 percent rule taught for years in medical schools. I think...

Data of lack?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 3, 2004... The statement by Kyeongjae Cho that "we don't have enough platinum" for a hydrogen economy based on fuel cells is simply wrong ("Virtual Nanotech: Modeling materials one atom at a time," SN: 2/7/04,p. 87). Anyone who is working in the fuel cell...

The beast within.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 3, 2004... Of course animals think, I'd say ("Unsure Minds," SN: 2/7/04, p. 90). But you say, "Many [scientists] theorized that nonhuman animals react to their surroundings without actually thinking" My observation over the decades has been that most...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
April 3, 2004... "The Bad Seed" (SN:3/20/04, p. 184) misidentified the journal carrying findings of brain-tumor stem cells. It was the Sept. 15, 200,3 Cancer Research.

Melting ice turns oddly dense.(A New Form of Water)
April 10, 2004... It's common knowledge that liquid water expands when it forms ice. Conversely, frozen water compacts as it melts. Now, a team of European researchers has made an ultrathin film of supercooled water that's much denser than normal water. The...

New find pushes back origin of tamed felines.(Cat's Cradle?)
April 10, 2004... Researchers have often given Egyptians living around 4,000 years ago credit for having first domesticated wildcats and then bred the tame felines. However, discoveries on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus indicate that people domesticated...

Carbon compound hints at life.(Martian Methane)
April 10, 2004... Evidence that parts of ancient Mars had oceans and might have supported some form of life in the past grabbed front-page headlines just a few weeks ago (SN: 3/27/04, p. 195). But detection of the simple carbon compound methane in the Martian...

Small helper compounds may have spawned early tools of life on Earth.(Molecular Midwives)(proflavine)
April 10, 2004... Life on Earth may owe its existence to a versatile little molecule that busied itself assembling the first genetic material some 4 billion years ago. This idea was proposed several years ago, and biochemists have now demonstrated the prowess of...

Study suggests new way to treat head trauma.(Save the Brain)
April 10, 2004... When a loved one has suffered a serious head injury, perhaps in a car crash or a fall, relatives and friends hope for the best. But physicians know a sobering truth: There's little they can do, and the patient stands a good chance of dying or...

Hummingbirds' surprising insect-catching style.(Flex That Bill)
April 10, 2004... High-speed videos of hummingbirds catching fruit flies show that the birds' lower bills are unexpectedly flexible, say researchers. In three species with straight, narrow bills, the lower half can bend downward part way along its length, even...

Anti-inflammatories' cancer effects vary by brand and tissue type.(Double-Edged Drugs)
April 10, 2004... Two new studies on medications being investigated as cancer treatments indicate that certain of these drugs have secondary effects that could enhance or undermine their antitumor activity. These compounds, which inhibit the inflammatory enzyme...

Quite a switch: bacteria and perhaps other life forms use RNA as environmental sensors.
April 10, 2004... Let's start at the very beginning, several billion years ago, when the first specks of life began to crawl across the barren planet that's now called Earth. There were no cameras to record images of these early life forms, and it's unlikely...

Tales of the undammed: removing barriers doesn't automatically restore river health.(Cover Story)
April 10, 2004... An unusual explosion along the Rappahannock River on Feb. 23 defined the day for thousands of onlookers. As planned, at least 650 pounds of explosives blasted a 40-meter-long hole through the bottom of Embrey Dam near Fredericksburg, Va....

Exercise after breast cancer extends life.(Survivorship)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2004... After a woman survives an initial bout with breast cancer, being physically active improves her odds of beating the disease over the long term, a new study finds. Women who perform the equivalent of just 1 to 3 hours of walking per week have 23...

Papillomavirus infections spike in sunny months.(Risk Factors)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2004... Women tempted by a little hanky-panky at the beach this summer might give this some thought: Getting sun could increase their vulnerability to a sexually transmitted virus--and, ultimately, to cervical cancer. Human papillomavirus (HPV), a...

Fluid lens flows into focus.(Technology)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2004... By controlling a boundary between oil and water, researchers have created a liquid lens that can quickly alter its shape in response to electric signals. Able to adjust its focusing distance from 5 centimeters to infinity in less than 10...

Gene implicated in apes' brain growth.(Neurogenetics)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2004... The brains of people who have had the misfortune of inheriting specific rare mutations in the ASPM gene are only one-third the normal size. That gene is the locus of beneficial alterations that began to accumulate as early as 8 million years...

Inhaling your food--and its cooking fuel.(Environment)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2004... A federal study finds that cooking without a working exhaust fan can flood the air of a typical house with ultrafine pollution-particles less than 0.1 micrometer in diameter. Recent investigations by other scientists have linked such ultrafine...

SARS vaccine tests well in mouse model.(Immunology)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2004... A vaccine that targets the virus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) stops the infection in mice, scientists report. Researchers fashioned the vaccine from a piece of viral DNA that includes the gene for a surface...

Bicycling Science.(Books)(Book Review)
April 10, 2004... BICYCLING SCIENCE DAVID GORDON WILSON Remarkably, this is the third edition of this comprehensive look at the history of bicycles and the science behind them. It's intended for bicycle enthusiasts as well as people interested in the physics...

The Butterfly Handbook: the Definitive Reference for Every Enthusiast.(Books)(Book Review)
April 10, 2004... THE BUTTERFLY HANDBOOK: The Definitive Reference for Every Enthusiast LEE D. MILLER AND JACQUELINE Y. MILLER This easy-to-use handbook references some 700 species in five families of butterflies found around the world: Papilionidae, the...

Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings.(Books)(Book Review)
April 10, 2004... CONSUMER GUIDE TO HOME ENERGY SAVINGS ALEX WILSON, JENNIFER THORNE, AND JOHN MORRILL Many people switch off lights and use fuel-efficient automobiles to save both money and energy. But a more important way to economize and aid the...

The Great Influenza: the Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.(Books)(Book Review)
April 10, 2004... THE GREAT INFLUENZA, The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History JOHN M. BARRY The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 and ended just two years later is a fleeting memory now, but it was the most devastating bout with disease the...

The Tale of the Scale: an Odyssey of Invention.(Books)(Book Review)
April 10, 2004... THE TALE OF THE SCALE: An Odyssey of Invention SOLLY ANGEL Many people have moments of brilliance when they think up an invention, but few see those ideas through, especially if they're not in the business that normally deals with the item...

Inaction verbs?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 10, 2004... Regarding "The Brain's Word Act: Reading verbs revs up motor cortex areas" (SN: 2/7/04, p. 83), did the researchers image the brains of disabled people who know the meaning of a verb but can't perform the action, or of people without any...

Friend in need.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 10, 2004... You don't need all the elaborate experiments described in "Unsure Minds: People may not be the only ones who know when they don't know" (SN: 2/7/04,p. 90). If you have worked at all with retrievers, you know the answer. A dog that is mystified...

Infecting the language.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 10, 2004... "Virus might explain respiratory ailments (SN: 2/14/04, p. 109) refers to a virus as a "microbe." I think of a virus more as a seed or spore. What definition is Science News using for the word? NEIL MURPHY, WALNUT CREEK, CALIF. Medical...

Expect copycats.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 10, 2004... "Tailoring Therapies: Cloned human embryo provides stem cells" (SN: 2/14/04, p. 99) details an advance in human-cloning efforts. The researchers charging into this field think that we should pass laws to keep others from abusing their research....

Model may predict El Nino up to 2 years in advance.(Weather Wise)
April 17, 2004... A refined model can foresee the onset of the climate-altering phenomenon known as El Nino as much as 2 years ahead of time, scientists say. Because a strong El Nino can wreak damage costing billions of dollars, such advance notice could prove...

Male baboons cooperate after cultural prodding.(Get Mellow, Fellow)
April 17, 2004... Adult male baboons are bad dudes. They regularly square off in bloody fights over access to food and females, whom they will also attack. In this vicious pecking order, males at the top bully bottom dwellers into a demoralized state of...

Crab's X rays probe Titan.(Rare Passage)
April 17, 2004... While observing a rare celestial alignment, astronomers made the first X-ray measurement of the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's most tantalizing moon. Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to have an atmosphere, and the new study...

Tick-semen protein is potential vaccine.(Slimmer Ticks, Less Disease)
April 17, 2004... Pregnant ticks gain a lot of weight. In fact, after females mate and as they feed on a host's blood, they quickly grow to about 100 times their original size. Researchers have long suspected that the semen of male ticks contains a protein...

Hormone boosts metabolic rate, induces weight loss in mice.(Fat Chance)
April 17, 2004... When injected into the brains of mice, a hormone produced by fat cells induces the animals to burn more energy than normal and lose weight, according to a new study. The finding bolsters the view that body fat carries on a complex chemical...

Gene activity predicts leukemia outcome.(Categorizing Cancers)
April 17, 2004... Two studies show that patterns of gene activity can be used to anticipate the prospects of patients who have a common form of leukemia. Doctors could someday use such gene patterns to make decisions about treatments, some researchers say. ...

RNA manufactures palladium particles.(Materials Factory)
April 17, 2004... Cells employ RNA to make proteins, but now materials scientists have figured out how to use these genetic molecules for making metallic nanoparticles. The feat could open new avenues for producing inorganic materials, tailored on the nanoscale,...

Shades of Venus: our neighbor in the solar system holds a lantern on faraway planets.
April 17, 2004... "We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other 'til the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the Earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004." --U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer...

Reinventing the yo-yo: a simple toy gets seriously techno.(Cover Story)
April 17, 2004... Got an extra 400 bucks? How about spending it on a yo-yo? A really nice yo-yo, a state-of-the-art, forged-magnesium-alloy, ultralong-spinning yo-yo. Later this year, Duncan Toys, a seller of inexpensive yo-yos for 75 years, will roll out this...

Nanotubes take on the Grand Canyon.(Nanoscience)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... Imagine reducing one of the most awe-inspiring geologic formations on Earth to the size of a dust particle. Although that may not have been Ravindra Kane's goal, he and his colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., recently...

Bacteria churn out new type of electronic paper.(Technology)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... For the past several years, researchers and electronics firms have pursued the goal of making a flexible computer display that looks and feels like paper. Current strategies for making e-paper, as it's called, typically rely on newly designed...

A drug to stop diabetes' onset?(Medicine)
April 17, 2004... In an effort to stem the increasing prevalence of type 1 diabetes, researchers are developing a drug that could protect susceptible individuals from the disease. People with type 1 diabetes need frequent insulin injections to control their...

Flame-retardant cotton gets a boost from clay.(Textiles)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... When it comes to clothing, many consumers prefer cotton to synthetic fibers. Cotton is soft, doesn't irritate the skin, and permits air to flow through, making it cool to wear in warm weather. "The drawback of cotton is that it's flammable,...

Rock-solid choices of first toolmakers.(Paleo-Technology)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... At the dawn of stone-tool production around 2.6 million years ago, our human ancestors already showed considerable insight into the task at hand. They worked mainly with rocks that they had carefully picked as suitable for being fashioned into...

Israeli cave yields Stone Age kills.(Early Hunters)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... In October 2000, workers blasting soft to widen a highway near Tel Aviv blew off the top a cave that had been covered by dirt for thousands of years. Archaeologists called to the site determined that the cave contained Stone Age artifacts. A...

Sizing up a black hole.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... Astronomers are closing in on the dimensions of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center. By observing a strong source of radio waves emanating from the Milky Way's core, researchers have calculated that the black hole occupies a...

Drug for preemies linked to problems.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
April 17, 2004... Treating premature infants with a common steroid can prevent chronic lung disease, but possibly at a cost, a new study finds. Scientists in Taiwan randomly assigned 262 premature infants, all on respirators, to receive periodic infusions of...

Audubon's Elephant: America's Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
April 17, 2004... AUDUBON'S ELEPHANT: America's Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America DUFF HART-DAVIS Even 150 years after his death, the name John James Audubon is synonymous with birds. This is because of his folio of life-size prints...

A Brief History of the Mind: from Apes to Intellect and Beyond.(Books: a selecion of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
April 17, 2004... A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIND From Apes to Intellect and Beyond WILLIAM H. CALVIN In a play on the title of Stephen Hawking's best selling book, Calvin considers how the human mind has developed over the pest 7 million years and what the...

Degrees Kelvin: a Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
April 17, 2004... DEGREES KELVIN: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy DAVID LINDLEY Young William Thomson was a prodigy. At the age of 16, he published his first technical paper on heat flow--a subject that he would revolutionize. This young man would...

The Kids Book of the Night Sky.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Children's Review)
April 17, 2004... THE KIDS BOOK OF THE NIGHT SKY ANN LOVE AND JANE DRAKE Season by season, youngsters living in the Northern Hemisphere can plot various aspects of the night sky using the star maps and appealing activities outlined here. In between, there...

Lab 257: the Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
April 17, 2004... LAB 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL Most maps don't feature Plum Island, located off the north shore of Long island. This is because the 850-acre island was the...

Sphere criticism.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 17, 2004... In "Candy Science: M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres" (SN: 2/14/04,p. 102), I read that an orb of a given size, when slightly flattened, will pack more densely than when perfectly round. No kidding? Do you suppose if we were to crush cars...

Myth of sterility.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 17, 2004... In answer to "Pill Puzzle: Do antibiotics increase breast cancer risk?" (SN: 2/21/04, p. 118), infections elevate activity of the immune system, so they might indirectly suppress tumors of all kinds. If so, antibiotics could increase the...

Wave reaction.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 17, 2004... "Catching Waves: Ocean-surface changes may mark tsunamis (SN: 2/21/04, p.116) says that tsunamis "disrupt winds; leading to the appearance of dark bands. I propose that upwelling above the crests creates a new surface initially unaffected by...

Ocean report urges new policies.(Sea Change)
April 24, 2004... To combat environmental degradation and preserve resources off the nation's shores, the U.S. government needs to double its investment in marine research, integrate management of coastal and inland ecosystems, and restructure the agencies that...

Careening electrons may rev up solar cells.(Photon Double Whammy)
April 24, 2004... In ordinary photovoltaic cells, lots of sunlight goes to waste as it heats up the cell. New results suggest that solar cells made from nanocrystals can trade this wasteful heating for an electricity-generating boost. Theoretical...

Hints of microbes in ancient ocean rocks.(Lava Life)
April 24, 2004... Samples of lava that erupted onto the ocean floor almost 3.5 billion years ago contain microscopic tubes that may have been created by microbes, researchers say. That scenario puts these structures among the oldest known physical remnants of...

Pattern hunters spy order among prime numbers.(Primal Progress)
April 24, 2004... Mathematicians have taken a step forward in understanding patterns within the primes, numbers divisible only by 1 and themselves. According to the new work, the population of prime numbers contains an infinite collection of arithmetic...

Therapy sheds light on transplant complication.(Zapping Wayward Cells)
April 24, 2004... Doctors sometimes recommend ultraviolet (UV) light exposure for people suffering from complications of a bone marrow transplant from a donor. The radiation can ameliorate skin lesions, such as rashes and ulcers, that are a common side effect of...

Armoring vesicles for more precise and reliable drug delivery.(Crafty Carriers)
April 24, 2004... Transporting drugs into the body can be hit-or-miss because many delicate molecules break down before they reach their target. In an attempt to develop protective drug-delivery tools, materials scientists have now fabricated micronsize polymer...

The moon that isn't there.(Puzzle on the Edge)
April 24, 2004... Contrary to predictions, the most distant object known in the solar system doesn't appear to have a moon. According to Hubble Space Telescope images released last week, the remote body dubbed Sedna roams the solar system's edge without a...

Hooking the gullible: Fish researchers analyze the science of a lure.
April 24, 2004... Just about everywhere you go in the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and Museum in Hayward, Wis., you'll find lures. On the walls and in display cases, vast arrays of fishing lures dominate the exhibits. Many of the baits mimic a...

Math lab: computer experiments are transforming mathematics.
April 24, 2004... Many people regard mathematics as the crown jewel of the sciences. Yet math has historically lacked one of the defining trappings of science: laboratory equipment. Physicists have their particle accelerators; biologists, their electron...

Male spiders amputate organs, run faster.(Zoology)(Brief Article)
April 24, 2004... Tiny male spiders of a species common to the southeastern United States routinely remove one of their two oversize external sex organs. It's an extreme act, but one that apparently enables them to run faster and longer, a potential advantage...