Science News articles from December 2007

Science News archives from December 2007

Sister planet: mission to venus reveals watery past.(This Week)
December 1, 2007... Dense clouds of sulfuric acid blanketing Venus have posed a problem for scientists seeking inside information about Earth's nearest planetary neighbor. Now, the Venus Express probe, launched by the European Space Agency in 2005, has...

Northwest passage: Americas populated via Alaska, genetics show.(This Week)
December 1, 2007... A single population of prehistoric Siberians crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and subsequently fanned out to populate North and South America, according to a new genetic analysis of present-day indigenous Americans. The study also...

So sproutish: anti-aging gene for plants gives drought protection.(This Week)
December 1, 2007... A gene for simulating youth in plants offers an unusual approach to protecting crops from drought, says an international research team. The gene IPT, borrowed from a bacterium, codes for an enzyme that can delay the stress-triggered...

Calculated risk: shedding light on fracture hazards in elderly.(This Week)
December 1, 2007... when doctors evaluate an older person who has fallen and broken a bone, they immediately look for signs of osteoporosis, the brittle-bone disease. Conventional wisdom holds that low bone-mineral density, the hallmark of osteoporosis, is chiefly...

Falling behind: North American terrain absorbs carbon dioxide too slowly.(This Week)
December 1, 2007... Long-term growth of North America's vegetation soaks up millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Though impressive, that rate doesn't keep pace with the prodigious emissions of the planet-warming gas due to human...

Base load: currents add detail to DNA structure.(This Week)(deoxyribonucleic acid)
December 1, 2007... Researchers have made the first precise measurements of DNA's ability to conduct electricity laterally, across its double helix structure. The team's newly improved methods confirm that DNA has some properties in common with those of...

Folding with a little help from friends.(This Week)(chaperone protein guides the folding of another protein)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A chaperone protein (bottom, yellow) called SecB guides the folding of another protein (transparent) in this artist's illustration. Interactions with chaperones are very common for all proteins," says Sander Tans of...

Rolling back the years: radiocarbon dating gets a remake.(Neandertals )
December 1, 2007... Archaeologists agree that Neandertals lost their evolutionary fight with Homo sapiens to become the Earth's dominant humanoid life form. But controversy continues over how long that fight lasted, and whether it was modern humans or changing...

Hey, what about us? there's more life on ice than celebrity bears.(seals, walruses and guillemots)(Cover story)
December 1, 2007... To Brendan Kelly, who has spent 25 springs there, the ice covering the Arctic Ocean looks like a lunar landscape. But it isn't really that lifeless. Detecting life in the snow and ice, he says, just requires the right sensory technology. And a...

Ancient-ape remains discovered in Kenya.(ANTHROPOLOGY)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Researchers have found fossils from an approximately 9.8 million-year-old ape that lived in eastern Africa. The creature belonged to a new genus, dubbed Nakalipithecus nakayamai, that may have evolved into a common ancestor of African apes and...

ADHD kids show slower brain growth.(BEHAVIOR)(attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder )(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Brain maturation in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) lags several years behind that of children with no psychiatric or neurological ailments, according to a new brain-imaging study. Developmental delays in ADHD...

Hydrogen makers.(ENERGY)(bacterias )(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... By putting bacteria to work, a new bioreactor produces hydrogen hundreds of times as fast as previous prototypes. In a microbial fuel cell, bacteria break down organic matter, releasing electrons and protons into a solution. The protons...

Additives may make youngsters hyper.(FOOD SCIENCE)(food additives and coloring)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Young kids seem to have boundless energy. The colorings and preservatives in soft drinks, candy, and other foods can boost kids' activity levels higher still, a new study finds. This increase fosters hyperactivity and inattentiveness,...

Patch guards against Montezuma's revenge.(BIOMEDICINE)(traveler's diarrhea)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... A skin patch can prime the immune system to fend off traveler's diarrhea, a test shows. Bacteria that contaminate food and water in developing countries cause roughly 17 million cases of diarrhea each year, many in visitors to those...

Bomb craters mean trouble for islanders.(BACTERIOLOGY)(skin infections )(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... Mysterious skin infections that have plagued residents of the Micronesian island of Satowan are traceable to swimming in the stagnant waters that fill bomb craters left over from World War II, a study shows. Scientists have successfully treated...

Sleeping sickness pill may work as well as injections.(BIOMEDICINE)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... An orally delivered drug for treatment of sleeping sickness is demonstrating considerable effectiveness in its first largescale test in Africa. Researchers used blood tests obtained at clinics in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,...

Dengue virus found in donated blood.(VIROLOGY)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... The virus that causes dengue fever has turned up in a dozen units of blood donated in Puerto Rico. The disturbing finding suggests that authorities might need to screen for the mosquito-borne virus in endemic areas, says epidemiologist Hamish...

Bed nets and insecticides.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... Kenyan researchers report that insecticidetreated bed nets can reduce malaria-related deaths in children ("Keep Out," SN: 9/29/07, p. 195). While these nets appear to provide preventive measures against malaria, my only concern is the toxicity...

Fat vibrations.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... It would be interesting to some way check fat versus muscle cells in airline pilots and crew; ship crews; anyone who rides the subways to work or the passengers and crew of any commuter train; taxicab drivers; or any construction worker who...

C[O.sup.2] and biodegradability.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... Soil water picks up carbon dioxide generated when soil organic matter decomposes, and this then escapes to the atmosphere ("Groundwater use adds C[O.sup.2] to the air" SN: 11/10/07, p. 301). This study should give pause to those who insist that...

Four Laws that Drive the Universe.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... FOUR LAWS THAT DRIVE THE UNIVERSE PETER ATKINS [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Although it deals with seemingly familiar concepts such as temperature, thermodynamics ranks among the most conceptually treacherous branches of physics. Many...

What are You Optimistic About?(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? JOHN BROCKMAN, ED. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an ode to the proposition that sometimes the glass is half full, scientists and cultural observers serve up more than 150 brief essays discussing what they are...

The Great Naturalists.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... THE GREAT NATURALISTS ROBERT HUXLEY, ED. Throughout history, naturalists have described the richness of the world around them, collected innumerable specimens, and expanded the stockpile of knowledge. In the process, they changed the course...

Food: The History of Taste.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... FOOD: THE HISTORY OF TASTE PAUL FREEDMAN, ED, [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Climate, trade, fashion, economics, geography, and technology all shape our tastes in foods. Paul Freeman, a Yale historian, has gathered 10 experts to explore how...

The Science of Stephen King: From Carrie to Cell, the Terrifying Truth Behind the Horror Master's Fiction.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... THE SCIENCE OF STEPHEN KING: From Carrie to Cell, the Terrifying Truth Behind the Horror Master's Fiction LOIS H. GRESH AND ROBERT WEINBERG [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Stephen King's continued success at churning out tales of...

Sickle save: skin cells fix anemia in mice.(This Week)
December 8, 2007... Using a new technique to turn skin cells into stem cells, scientists have corrected sickle cell anemia in mice. The advance provides proof of principle that stem cells made without embryos can treat disease, at least in lab animals, says Rudolf...

Chimp champ: ape aces memory test, outscores people.(This Week)
December 8, 2007... OK, humanity: time to pull up our socks. In a test of rapid number recollection, college students were resoundingly outperformed by a young chimpanzee. At Kyoto University in Japan, students and chimps saw an array of five of the numerals...

The salt flat that isn't flat: world's largest playa sports ridges, valleys.(This Week)
December 8, 2007... People have long known that the world isn't flat. Now, an innovative field survey of the world's largest salt flat--a New Jersey-size playa high in the Andes--reveals that the barren expanse unexpectedly has minuscule variations in topography....

15 = 3 x 5: photons do their first quantum math.(This Week)
December 8, 2007... Two teams of physicists have independently confirmed that 15 equals 3 times 5--an arduous task considering that they've done it by manipulating the quantum states of photons. The results are a step toward optical quantum computers, which could...

Angiogenesis factors: tracking down the suspects in blood vessel growth near tumors.(This Week)
December 8, 2007... Cancerous growths rely on a surrounding tangle of blood vessels to support their reckless expansion, and scientists have spent decades hunting for the compounds that promote the development of such vessels. Although tumors are known to generate...

Perchlorate pump: molecule draws contaminant into breast milk.(This Week)
December 8, 2007... A molecular pump designed to transport iodine also concentrates the pollutant perchlorate in breast milk, scientists have shown. The result is higher levels of the chemical in breast milk than in other parts of the body, with implications for...

A sunlike star's early development.(This Week)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This infrared portrait of an embryonic sunlike star reveals an early, crucial step in the process of planet formation. According to most theories, the spinning cloud of gas and dust from which a star arises should...

Muons meet the Maya: physicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets.
December 8, 2007... At its most glamorous, the life of an experimental high-energy physicist consists of smashing obscure subatomic particles with futuristic-sounding names into each other to uncover truths about the universe--using science's biggest, most...

Lettuce liability: programs to keep salads germfree raise wildlife and conservation concerns.
December 8, 2007... Little more than a year ago, supermarkets from coast to coast stripped fresh spinach from produce aisles as a food-poisoning outbreak swept the nation. From mid-August through September 2006, virulent bacterial infections sickened at least 204...

Malaria's new guises.(INFECTIOUS DISEASES)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... The complicated life cycle of the malaria parasite has just taken another swerve. Scientists have observed Plasmodium falci-parum enjoying three distinct lifestyles in the blood of infected children. Two of these three states have never been...

Divorce is not ecofriendly.(SCIENCE AND SOCIETY)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... Divorce often takes adevastating emotional toll on families, and it has significant impacts on the environment as well, a new study suggests. When couples split and form additional households, it dramatically boosts the consumption of...

Diabetes drug shows new potential.(BIOMEDICINE)(exendin-4)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... A drug currently prescribed for people with type 2 diabetes might also prove useful for individuals who are newly diagnosed with the type 1 form of the disease. Whereas type 2 diabetes typically appears in adulthood, type 1 usually strikes in...

Putting tumors on pause.(CANCER)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... Precancerous breast cells don't degenerate into full-blown cancer when production of a certain protein is blocked, new research on mice shows. The protein, called focal adhesion kinase (FAK), could offer a new target for developing drugs...

Strategies to improve teaching.(SCIENCE & SOCIETY)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... American students' science and math skills have been losing ground relative to those of their peers in other countries even as the economic importance of analytical skills has continued to climb. A new book from the National Research Council...

Tractor beam.(NANOTECHNOLOGY)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... A simple magnet can go a long way toward eliminating bacteria. Xuefei Huang and his colleagues at the University of Toledo in Ohio coated nanoparticles of rusty iron with sugary molecules normally found on the membranes of mammalian cells....

Sharper than expected.(PHYSICS)(microscopy)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... A new technique beats the resolution limits of ordinary microscopes in a way that seems to defy conventional optical theory, its discoverers say. Peter Stark of Harvard Medical School in Boston and his collaborators exposed a...

Botanists refine family tree for flowering plants.(BOTANY)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... Two research teams have each used the biggest collection yet of flowering-plant genes to map out the floral family tree. "We got the same answer," says Michael J. Moore of Oberlin College in Ohio. Both family trees show the same basic...

Errors of biblical proportions.(LETTERS)(Correction notice)(Letter to the editor)
December 8, 2007... "Lazarus taxa" is an appropriate name for species that seem to have been resurrected ("Back from the Dead?" SN: 11/17/07, p. 312). However, the Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead was a householder who lived with his sisters, Mary and...

The influence of drugs.(LETTERS)(bipolar disorder)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... Two recent articles hit on the same theme. "Bipolar Express: Mental ailment expands rapidly among youth" (SN: 9/8/07, p. 150) discussed the recent sharp increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The summary of the new book Shyness: How...

Win by losing?(LETTERS)(liposuction)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... "If You Can Stomach It: Obesity surgery extends life span" (SN: 8/25/07, p. 115) states that "those who get the [bariatric] surgery live longer than those who don't" That raises the question whether liposuction to reduce a disproportionately...

Big yawn.(LETTERS)(sleeping and weight gain)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
December 8, 2007... It's not surprising that a study shows that "Too little sleep may fatten kids" (SN: 11/17/07, p. 318). Less sleep leads to more snacking leads to weight gain. IRWIN TYLER, SPRING VALLEY, N.Y.

Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2007... TRYING LEVIATHAN: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature D. GRAHAM BURNETT As readers of Moby Dick will recall, early whalers tended to describe their prey as "big fish."...

Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2007... CRUISIN' THE FOSSIL FREEWAY KIRK JOHNSON This lavishly illustrated travelogue describes the adventures of paleontologist Johnson--the chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science--and artist Ray Troll as they drive across the...

The Story of Measurement.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2007... THE STORY OF MEASUREMENT ANDREW ROBINSON It's hard to imagine civilization without measurement. In addition to length, weight, height, and other obvious units, time and language require standards. Current quantification includes concepts...

The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2007... THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic ELIZABETH KOLBERT AND FRANCIS SPUFFORD, EDS. The polar regions have been imagined as much as explored. This compilation of essays and stories takes...

Birder's Conservation Handbook: 100 North American Birds at Risk.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 8, 2007... BIRDER'S CONSERVATION HANDBOOK: 100 North American Birds at Risk JEFFERY V. WELLS Avian ecologist Wells, senior scientist for the International Boreal Conservation Campaign, chose his list of the continent's top 100 troubled birds by...

Ancient ailment? Early human may have carried tuberculosis.(This Week)
December 15, 2007... Check your tile countertop for fossils. A consumptive Homo erectus--or at least a piece of him--might be trapped there. While cutting coveted travertine into tiles, a saw operator in Turkey sliced through a fossilized skull and gave the...

Dear reader of Science News.(LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER)
December 15, 2007... It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the new Editor in Chief of Science News, Tom Siegfried. As one would expect for the venerable Science News, Tom is one of the nation's leading science journalists, with a long track record as both...

Hatch a thief: brains incline birds toward a life of crime.(This Week)
December 15, 2007... It's not brawn but brains that matter in the rise of crime families among birds. That's one of the conclusions from a study of traits shared by families of bird species notorious for stealing food, says Julie Morand-Ferron of the...

Pulling together: mitotic ring self-assembly revealed.(This Week)
December 15, 2007... During cell division, a ring of proteins forms around a cell's "equator" and then contracts to pinch the cell in half. These proteins arrange themselves into an orderly ring by a random process of searching, grabbing, and pulling each other,...

Stellar opposites: sky survey reveals new halo of stars.(This Week)
December 15, 2007... The Milky Way galaxy possesses a distinct outer halo that orbits in the opposite direction from its inner halo and the rest of the galaxy, researchers say. This second halo contains some of the most primitive stars in the universe, offering new...

Run of the mill: finding galactic building blocks in early universe.(This Week)(Lyman-alpha-emitting galaxies )
December 15, 2007... Hunters of distant galaxies, meet Joe Average. For more than 3 decades, astronomers have scoured the skies for tiny, ultrafaint galaxies that could be the early building blocks of the massive galaxies common in the universe today. Now...

Light swell: optical rogue waves resemble oceanic ones.(This Week)
December 15, 2007... Slightly noisy signals can turn into rare large spikes in an optical fiber's output, in much the same way as unpredictable weather conditions occasionally create monstrous, isolated oceanic waves, researchers have found. The new technique...

Prairie revival: researchers put restoration to the test.(Cover story)
December 15, 2007... It took less than a century after John Deere unveiled his steel-bladed plow in 1837 for the North American prairie to all but disappear. For 20 million years, a nearly 1,000-mile-wide swath of unbroken grassland belted the continent's...

The long road to beta cells: quest for type 1 diabetes cure inches forward.
December 15, 2007... In 2000, researchers in Canada reported a possible breakthrough in the treatment of type 1 diabetes. By transfusing insulin-producing cells from donated pancreases into patients, the researchers provided what looked like cures. Within a week...

Big kids at risk for heart disease.(EPIDEMIOLOGY)(Brief article)
December 15, 2007... Being a weighty kid carries a heavy toll into adulthood. Overweight children grow up to have an elevated risk for blocked coronary arteries, a long-term Danish study reports. "Our findings suggest that as children are becoming heavier...

Female antelopes take the lead in courtship.(ZOOLOGY)(Brief article)
December 15, 2007... Among topi antelopes, it's the males that need convincing. Topis, medium-sized antelopes in Africa, reverse the standard roles in courtship, says Jakob Bro-Jorgensen of the Zoological Society of London. "When biologists talk about the...

Cell's core pore structure solved.(COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY)(cell's nucleus)
December 15, 2007... In a challenge that's like solving a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, scientists have worked out how 456 proteins fit together to form a doughnut-shaped gateway to the cell's nucleus. Many such gateways cover the nucleus like polka dots,...

Escaping flatland.(METHODS)(Brief article)
December 15, 2007... Nothing is more iconic of biological research than the petri dish. Yet the idea that growing cells in a flat dish can sometimes lead scientists astray is gaining traction. As an alternative, some researchers are experimenting on cells...

Cells' innards may share origin.(EVOLUTION)(cell nucleus research)
December 15, 2007... Despite their outward differences, many of the organelles within cells may have a common evolutionary heritage. In a ease of scientific serendipity, data gathered by separate research teams working on various organelles lend new support to...

Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 15, 2007... BEYOND HUMAN: Living with Robots and Cyborgs GREGORY BENFORD AND ELISABETH MALARTRE In the future, robotic assistants will be as pervasive as personal computers are today. The technological augmentation of humans that began with pacemakers and...

The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayers Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greates Scientist.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 15, 2007... THE ARCHIMEDES CODEX: HOW a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist REVIEL NETZ AND WILLIAM NOEL Some of the works of Archimedes--the Greek thinker and tinkerer who lived in 3rd-century B.C. Sicily...

Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Realtionship.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 15, 2007... LOVE AND SEX WITH ROBOTS: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships DAVID LEVY Today, some people form fervent attachments to their Blackberry devices, electronic pets, and even laptops. Could true love be that far off? And what about...

Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 15, 2007... APOLLO'S FIRE: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy JAY INSLEE AND BRACKEN HENDRICKS The authors present a manifesto for the Apollo Alliance, a clean-energy advocacy organization that Inslee, a congressman from Washington state, helped found...

Crime Scene Chemistry For The Armchair Sleuth.(Books: A selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 15, 2007... CRIME SCENE CHEMISTRY FOR THE ARMCHAIR SLEUTH CATHY COBB, MONTY L. FETTEROLF, AND JACK G. GOLDSMITH From finding and collecting trace evidence to measuring blood alcohol levels and analyzing other bodily fluids, law enforcement depends on...

Fuzzy logic.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 15, 2007... Astronomer Masanori Iye of the National Observatory of Japan blames the blurry appearance of meteor trails at about 100 kilometers altitude on the fact that they were photographed with telescopes focused at infinity ("Out-of-focus find," SN:...

Treating the symptoms.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 15, 2007... "Stimulant Inaction: ADHD drug's lift proves surprisingly weak" (SN: 11/3/07, p. 277) suggests that Ritalin fails to "cure" attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Ritalin for ADHD is like glasses for a vision problem. True, it aids some...

Who don't you love?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
December 15, 2007... "Tortoise Genes and Island Beings" (SN: 11/10/07, p. 298) refers to Lonesome George, the Galapagos tortoise, as "misanthropic"--meaning a hater of people. He certainly has good reason to dislike humans, but I wonder how the investigators could...

Correction.(LETTERS)
December 15, 2007... "Flawed Stem Cells Yield Fragile X Clues" (SN: 11/17/07, p. 310) referred to boys inheriting a defective gene on the X chromosome from either parent. In fact, the X chromosome in males can come only from the mother. Also, the research described...

Portrait of a meltdown: many factors led to 2007's record low in Arctic sea ice.(This Week)
December 22, 2007... A variety of climatological factors converged this year in a perfect storm that dramatically melted the Arctic Ocean's ice cover to a record low. The abrupt downturn could be a harbinger of ice-poor summers for decades to come. In late...

Limiting damage: fragile X symptoms modulated in mice.(This Week)
December 22, 2007... By cutting in half the activity of a gene, scientists corrected many symptoms of a genetic defect in mice analogous to fragile X syndrome, a leading cause of inherited mental retardation in people. The research suggests a new target for...

Black hole bully: galaxy blasts its smaller neighbor.(This Week)
December 22, 2007... War has been declared between two galaxies, and the future doesn't look good for the underdog: The larger galaxy's powerful jet of high-energy radiation and matter is hitting its helpless neighbor. Ambulance-chasing astronomers hope to take...

Mean streets: kids' verbal skills drop in bad neighborhoods.(This Week)
December 22, 2007... You can take a child out of a severely disadvantaged neighborhood and move to a nicer part of town, but you can't always take a bad neighborhood's harmful effects on verbal development out of the child. That's the implication of a new,...

Not Yet: CDC panel questions antidepressant gene test.(This Week)(Centers for Disease Control And Prevention)
December 22, 2007... About half of all depressed people who take standard antidepressant drugs fail to improve. Some suffer unpleasant side effects and abandon the medicines, while others simply don't feel better. Commercial tests claim to predict, by a genetic...

Unseen risk: lifestyle, physical problems may underlie psoriasis link to early mortality.(This Week)
December 22, 2007... Severe psoriasis knocks as many years off a person's life expectancy as high blood pressure does, a new study suggests. Psoriasis is a skin disease that causes an overproduction of skin cells. Most people use topical treatments on the thick...

Furry math: macaques can do sums like people in a hurry.(This Week)
December 22, 2007... Monkey see, monkey add. And in the same test of high-speed arithmetic, it turns out, people see and people add using what looks like the monkey method for doing rough sums without counting. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "What we're doing is...

North by northwest: the planet's wandering magnetic poles help reveal history of Earth and humans.
December 22, 2007... Hikers in the wilderness often place their faith in a trusty compass. But any navigator worth his salt knows that compasses can't truly be trusted: Only along certain longitudes in the Northern Hemisphere does a compass needle point due north....

Dead serious: experts worry about lack of progress in efforts to reduce lifeless zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
December 22, 2007... The water that tumbles out of the Mississippi River into the salty Gulf of Mexico has traveled thousands of miles. From its source in Minnesota, the river winds through 10 states on its journey to the ocean, collecting runoff from the Rocky...

Tied up in knots: anything that can tangle up, will, including DNA.
December 22, 2007... Knotted threads secure buttons to shirts. Knots in ropes attach boats to piers. You can find knots in shoestrings, ties, ribbons, and bows. But even without Boy Scouts or sailors, knots would be everywhere. Call it Murphy's Law of knots: If...