Science News articles from February 2004

Science News archives from February 2004

Nitrogen unbound: new reaction breaks strong chemical link.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... For almost a century, industrial chemists have had to rely on hellishly high temperatures and gas pressures to cleave the tenacious chemical bond that holds together each two-atom nitrogen molecule. That done, chemists can use the nitrogen from...

The brain's word act: reading verbs revs up motor cortex areas.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... For more than 60 years, scientists have known that a strip of neural tissue that runs ear-to-ear along the brain's surface orchestrates most voluntary movement, from raising a fork to kicking a ball. A new brain-imaging study has revealed that...

Two new elements made: atom smashups yield 113 and 115.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... Last summer, when more than 8 million trillion calcium ions blasted a thin film of americium atoms nonstop for more than a month, the collisions generated four atoms of never-before-seen element 115, a Russian-U.S. team now reports. Each...

Early warning? Inflammatory protein is tied to colon cancer risk.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... C-reactive protein (CRP), a compound that studies have associated with heart disease, may also signal susceptibility to colon cancer, researchers report in the Feb. 4 Journal of the American Medical Association. The study is the first to link...

Gassing up: oxygen's rise may have promoted complex life.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... Life's long journey from single-celled organisms to multicellular plants and animals may have depended upon the increasing presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, a new study suggests. S. Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University in State...

Mangrove might: nearby trees boost reef-fish numbers.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... Mangrove forests are "unexpectedly" important to the fish on neighboring coral reefs, says a research team that took a new approach to assessing the tree-fish connection. Biologists already knew that coastal groves of the tough trees,...

Money crunch: tight budget leaves scientists disappointed.(Science news: this week)
February 7, 2004... This week, President Bush released the details of his proposed $2.4-trillion federal budget for fiscal year (FY) 2005, which begins Oct. 1, 2004. Of that figure, nearly $132 billion will go to research and development--an increase of 3.3...

Virtual nanotech: modeling materials one atom at a time.
February 7, 2004... It's hard enough to thread a needle. Imagine trying to manipulate threads and needles miniaturized to one-millionth the normal size. Now, you're thinking like the emerging group of nanotechnologists whose growing dexterity at fashioning new...

Unsure minds: people may not be the only ones who know when they don't know.
February 7, 2004... A cat crouches on a kitchen floor, gazing up at glass of milk high on a counter. The animal's muscles tense. Its tail bobs from side to side like a metronome. The distance from floor to counter is a long way to cover in a single feline leap,...

Surgery removes grenade from soldier's head.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... In some operating rooms, the patient isn't the only person whose life is on the line. Since World War II, surgeons have chronicled the removal of potentially explosive projectiles from dozens of wounded people. In the latest such case to be...

Better protection from mad cow disease.(Science & Society)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... The Food and Drug Administration has announced several new measures to keep meat that's potentially infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)--better known as mad cow disease--out of the food supplies of both people and cattle. ...

Ice-dammed lakes had cooling effect.(Earth Science)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... About 90,000 years ago, an ice sheet blocked the flow of rivers in northern Russia, leading to the formation of massive lakes. New computer models suggest that those frigid bodies of water significantly cooled the region in summer months. That...

Busy hospitals may not be best choice.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... Since 1979, a host of studies has suggested that people in need of surgery should search out a hospital where a lot of surgeries of the required type are performed (SN: 7/17/99, p. 44). At a place such as that, the theory goes, the most...

Nature's tiniest rotor runs like clockwork.(Chemistry)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... With amazing efficiency, cells synthesize and store energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate, ATP for short. Bioengineers often regard the enzyme that makes this chemical energy as the ultimate molecular machine. Hiroyasu Itoh at...

Light whips platinum into shape.(Materials Science)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... Researchers have created a platinum foam that can catalyze the splitting of water. John Shelnutt of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque and his collaborators embedded light-absorbing molecules called porphyrins in the membranes of...

Malaria drug boosts recovery rates.(Biomedicine)(artesunate derived from sweet worm-wood)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... Adding a drug derived from the Chinese herbal medicine known as sweet worm-wood boosts the effectiveness of standard malaria treatment, even in some areas where malaria parasites are resistant to frontline drugs. This finding comes from an...

Fish in the dark still size up mates.(Zoology)(Brief Article)
February 7, 2004... Female fish living in a cave still prefer a mate with a nice, big body, even though it's too dark to see him. In plenty of species, females choose large males, so that preference in the Atlantic mollie (Poecilia mexicana) comes as no...

A Brief History of the Smile.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 7, 2004... ANGUS TRUMBLE The word smile generally makes us think of happiness, yet there are lots of other types of smiles that don't necessarily have that connotation: the leer, the snarl, the smirk, and the lewd grin, to name just a few. Trumble...

Dreams of Iron and Steel: Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 7, 2004... DEBORAH CADBURY This story of seven great engineering feats is massive in every way. The structures are huge; the scope is wide; the number of people it took to build each structure is astounding. Cadbury details how each project was...

Once Upon a Universe: Not-so-Grimm Tales of Cosmology.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 7, 2004... ROBERT GILMORE Gilmore fashions scientific ideas around familiar stories. In Alice in Quantumland, he explored quantum mechanics through the characters and settings of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Now, Gilmore delves...

Sunquakes: Probing the Interior of the Sun.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 7, 2004... J.B. ZIRKER The sun's surface is covered with granules--hot, buoyant bubbles of gas that carry heat from the solar interior to the surface. Solar granules are typically the size of Alaska--though they look small from Earth, a mere...

The Survival Game: How Game Theory Explains the Biology of Cooperation and Competition.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 7, 2004... DAVID P. BARASH Without even knowing it, we play games. Whether wooing a lover or waging a war, people are competing. And we aren't the only creatures that do this. Scientists turn to game theory--the study and mathematics of how...

Warm topic.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 7, 2004... I was fascinated by the article on heat production in flowers ("Warm-Blooded Plants?" SN: 12/13/03, p. 379). It speculated on the evolutionary origins of such thermogenesis and observed how it predominates in ancient lineages of flowering...

Mindful question.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 7, 2004... The article "Ketones to the Rescue" (SN: 12/13/03, p. 376) describes attempts to use ketones as a substitute for glucose when it's unavailable to the brain because converted fats can't penetrate the brain. Wouldn't it be simpler to feed or...

Ccloned human embryo provides stem cells.(Tailoring Therapies)
February 14, 2004... Scientists have for the first time used cloning to create human embryos that live long enough in a laboratory dish to have their stem cells harvested. The feat could set the stage for physicians to produce cells and tissues, tailored to a...

Long strand folds into octahedron.(Snappy DNA)
February 14, 2004... DNA may embody the blueprint of life, but it could also be the stuff of future nanotechnologies. In a feat of molecular engineering, scientists recently designed a strand of DNA that can spontaneously fold into an octahedron. Although...

Winged insects appear surprisingly ancient.(Early Flight?)
February 14, 2004... New analyses of a fossil ignored for decades in a British museum suggest that winged insects may have emerged as early as 400 million years ago, tens of millions of years before scientists expected. The fossil had been excavated near...

Proteins may predict preeclampsia.(Pregnancy alert)
February 14, 2004... Blood concentrations of two proteins that affect blood vessel growth appear to foretell preeclampsia, the baffling pregnancy condition that can threaten the lives of both a woman and her unborn baby. The findings from two new studies may lead...

Baboons, chimps enter the realm of cave.(Some Primates' Sheltered Lives)
February 14, 2004... Many anthropologists assume that until our evolutionary ancestors learned to control fire to keep predators at bay, primates avoided caves. Two separate studies in Africa now indicate that some groups of baboons and chimpanzees regularly enter...

Bees that strip carrion also take wasp young.(Flesh Eaters)
February 14, 2004... A South American bee that ignores flowers and collects the meat from animal carcasses turns out to have an unexpected taste for live prey too. This stingless bee, Trigona hypogea, carries off the youngsters left behind in newly abandoned...

M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres.(Candy Science)
February 14, 2004... Pouring M&MS into a bowl leads to a marvel of packing efficiency, a team of sweet-toothed scientists reports. Using bench experiments and computer simulations, the team has found that squashed or stretched versions of spheres snuggle...

Where'd I put that? Maybe it takes a bird brain to find the car keys.
February 14, 2004... Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there's always Clark's nutcracker to think about. This pale-gray bird with black wings and a long beak flits through woodlands in the West, collecting seeds during...

Code breakers: scientists tease out the secrets of proteins that DNA wraps around.
February 14, 2004... Jamming a week's worth of clothing into a carry-on suitcase is tough, but consider the challenge a human cell faces with its DNA. More than 6 feet of this double-stranded molecule, making up a cell's 23 pairs of chromosomes, must get stuffed...

Diagnosing the developing world: turning high-tech innovations into low-cost medical tests.
February 14, 2004... Biotechnologists envision a future in which high-tech gadgets using a single drop of blood can determine a person's risk for all known genetic diseases. Not only could these technologies be faster and more sensitive than the best diagnostic...

Bacteria do the twist.(Microbiology)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... Most bacteria are shaped like rods or spheres, but some assume curved or helical forms. A newly identified bacterial protein dubbed crescentin generates the sinuous shapes, a new study indicates. Until about 4 years ago, microbiologists...

Poof goes an atmosphere.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... Blasted by the heat and radiation from its planet's parent star, the atmosphere of a distant planet is blowing off into space. Astronomers have now detected carbon and oxygen escaping from the upper reaches of the searingly hot planet...

Monkeys heed neural calls of the wild.(Neuroscience)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... A part of the brain that's involved in sound processing shows pronounced activity when rhesus monkeys hear their comrades vocalizing but not when the same animals hear other sounds, a new brain-scan investigation finds. In human evolution,...

Virus might explain respiratory ailments.(Infectious Diseases)(human metapneumovirus)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... Three years ago, researchers in the Netherlands isolated a novel virus from children who had cold and flu symptoms but no sign of a typical cold or flu virus. The scientists named the mysterious pathogen human metapneumovirus. A study in the...

How blind mole rats find their way home.(Zoology)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... The blind mole rat is the first animal found to navigate by combining dead reckoning with a sense of Earth's magnetic field, researchers say. People and dogs can manage minor feats of dead reckoning, going in the right direction for at...

Ancient whalers altered arctic lakes.(Earth Science)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... Analyses of sediment and water from an arctic lake indicate that an ancient whaling community left a mark on the lake's ecosystem that persists today, even though the settlement was abandoned centuries ago. Thule Inuit whalers moved from...

European find gets Stone Age date.(Anthropology)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2004... More than a century ago, amateur archaeologists uncovered the skeletons of six people, along with various ceremonial items, inside an Italian cave called Barma Grande. Estimates of when these people died still provoke controversy. ...

The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 14, 2004... A few years ago, no one imagined that the human genome contains only 30,000 to 40,000 genes. Today, scientists are working to figure out how such a finite number of instructions produce the most complicated operating system known to man--the...

The Night Sky: Month-by-Month, January-December 2004.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 14, 2004... This guide charts planets, constellations, stars, and other features of the sky that can be viewed on any clear night throughout 2004. Loaded with photographs and illustrations that accompany lucid, instructive text, this guide helps would-be...

Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 14, 2004... In a series of provocative essays, the energy and environment correspondent for The Economist considers the problem of securing enough energy for modern society and then identifies three hopeful trends. Vaitheeswaran argues that the nature of...

The Science Book.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 14, 2004... This lovely book consists of some 250 summaries of events that have defined science since around 35,000 B.C. Each one-page essay is accompanied by a stirring image and is penned by a prominent scientist or science writer. The scope is vast,...

Sea Dragons: Predators of the Prehistoric Oceans.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 14, 2004... Land-loving dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex, brontosaurus, and stegosaurus are world-renowned. Ellis profiles some of the dinosaurs that moviemaker Steven Spielberg didn't bring to life-those that swam the ancient oceans, including...

Revealing words.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 14, 2004... "Bookish Math: Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries" (SN: 12/20&27/03, p. 392) skipped one of the most significant methods for analyzing text for authorship. On March 11, 1887, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall reported in Science...

Neural aging walks tall: aerobic activity fuels elderly brains, minds.
February 21, 2004... Seniors interested in pumping up their brains and maintaining an attentive edge might consider taking this inexpensive prescription: Go for a walk every 2 or 3 days. Don't sweat it, but make an effort. Limit each walk to between 10 and 45...

Bird dilemma: more seabirds killed when boats discard fewer fish.
February 21, 2004... Records stretching back 30 years indicate a tricky problem for marine conservation: When fishing vessels discard less fish-waste material, scavenging seabirds called great skuas attack and kill more neighboring seabirds. The link shows up...

Catching waves: ocean-surface changes may mark tsunamis.
February 21, 2004... A new theoretical model that describes a tsunami's interaction with winds may explain enigmatic observations associated with some of the high-speed ocean waves and could lead to a technique for spotting approaching tsunamis long before they hit...

Nanosponges: plastic particles pick up pollutants.
February 21, 2004... Ground contamination from crude oil and tar is notoriously difficult to clean up because these substances cling tenaciously to the soil. Remediation of such pollution at some of the hundreds of hazardous-waste sites around the United States has...

Monkey love: male marmosets think highly of sex.
February 21, 2004... Upon noticing the sexy scent of a female marmoset, a male doesn't pursue her mindlessly, according to a new brain-imaging study. Male marmosets appear to think about--not just react to--what they're getting into, just as people do, the authors...

Drug racing: gene tied to HIV-drug response.(Efavirenz)
February 21, 2004... A genetic mutation seven times as common in blacks as in whites increases the odds that people taking a common HIV medicine will surfer side effects that lead them to halt the treatment. Because the mutation slows metabolism of the drug...

Pill puzzle: do antibiotics increase breast cancer risk?
February 21, 2004... After poring over the pharmacy records of more than 10,000 women, researchers have identified a disturbing correlation: Women in the study who had breast cancer tended to have a history of heavier antibiotic use than cancerfree women. Although...

The rat in the hat.(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... Wide awake, a rat placed inside a typical brain scanner is too active for images to be recorded. For studies of drug effects on behavior, anesthesia is no alternative. So, Craig L. Woody of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and his...

Bare-naked galaxies: in cosmic slam dances, some galaxies run out of gas.
February 21, 2004... Pity the ravaged galaxy known as C153. As far as astronomers can tell, this eviscerated body once resembled a grand spiral galaxy like out Milky Way, its several slender, starlit arms wrapping around a brilliant disk. That was before the...

Computation's new leaf: plants may be calculating creatures.
February 21, 2004... To most people, the word computer conjures up an image of a PC sitting on a desktop. According to a new study, however, complex computations may also be underway in another bit of office equipment: the potted plant that brightens up the...

A view of Mars, European style.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... Although the Mars lander Beagle 2 is presumed dead (SN: 1/31/04, p. 67), its mother craft, the European Space Agency's Mars Express, has transmitted its first data from a polar orbit about the Red Planet. Researchers unveiled the findings Jan....

Some T cells may be a fetus' best friend.(Immunology)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... During a healthy pregnancy, a woman's immune system somehow manages to avoid attacking the fetus she's carrying, even though it has plenty of foreign characteristics contributed by the father. In the March Nature Immunology, researchers...

New supergas debuts.(Physics)
February 21, 2004... When particles of matter cooperate with each other, the result tan be something super. For instance, there's superconductivity, in which coordinated pairs of electrons flow resistance free through a solid, and there's superfluidity, in which...

Putting the brakes on toxic shock.(Microbiology)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... Scientists in Sweden have discovered the cascade of molecular events that underpins many cases of toxic shock syndrome. The researchers have even successfully foiled this deadly sequence in animals, suggesting that a similar approach might...

Nuclear pudding--to go.(Physics)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... Detectors at a giant particle collider have recorded apparent evidence for an exotic form of nuclear matter that scientists compare to a slab of pudding moving at nearly the speed of light. Motes of that extraordinary stuff may have formed...

Radical molecule could produce plastic magnets.(Chemistry)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... A team of chemists has synthesized an unusual organic molecule that could lead to cheaper and lighter magnets. Using theoretical calculations, as well as experimental data, researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and the...

Finding the star that was.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
February 21, 2004... Sifting through archival images, astronomers have identified the star whose explosive demise was recorded by telescopes last year. It's the third time scientists have observed what a particular star looked like before it was blown to...

Galaxies and the Cosmic Frontier.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 21, 2004... WILLIAM H. WALLER AND PAUL W. HODGE This book is the fifth in a series dating back to Harlow Shapley's original version of Galaxies, published in 1943. Each book is devoted to presenting the story of galaxies and their evolution over...

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 21, 2004... BRIAN FAGAN For most of human existence, the world's climate has transitioned from cold to warm and back again. Thanks to data being retrieved from cores drilled in oceans floors, ice sheets, and high-altitude glaciers around the world,...

PANDORA'S BABY: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 21, 2004... ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG This past July, Louise Brown marked her 25th birthday. Not only did Brown's birth mark a major milestone, but so did her conception, as she was the world's first test-tube baby. At the time, opponents of the technology...

Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 21, 2004... ROGER TOOK Russian Lapland sits in the furthest northwest corner of the Russian Federation, above the Arctic Circle. After 1920, the Bolsheviks collectivized the region and subjugated its natives, known as Laaps or Saami. No westerner has...

Strange Universe: the Weird and Wild Science of Everyday Life--on Earth and Beyond.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
February 21, 2004... BOB BERMAN In nearly three dozen vignettes, Berman uses science to unravel some of the conundrums we face every day. Questions ranging from why the curtain blows against your leg when you take a shower to why tree shadows on snow are blue...

Thin skin.(Letters)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
February 21, 2004... I find the language of "Thin Skin" (SN: 1/3/04, p.11) to be judgmental and unscientific. For example, "desert pavement and their biota are wounded by human activity" is neither artistic nor scientific. Such narrow, biased views of ecology have...

Out with the bad air.(Letters)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
February 21, 2004... In "My Own Private Bad-Air Day: Outdoor data underrate pollutant exposure" (SN: 1/3/04, p. 4), the statement is made that personal environmental exposures to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are easily solved. The implication is that if you...

Got the feeling.(Letters)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
February 21, 2004... I do not know about the test of your readers, but I do "hear" at least some low frequency sounds ("Infrasonic Symphony," SN: 1/10/04, p. 26), but not with my ears. The nerves in my feet feel these vibrations and my brain parses the sounds to my...

Minimal to whom?(Letters)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
February 21, 2004... The contrast between the first and last sentences of "Novel drug fights leukemia" (SN: 01/10/04, p. 30) is puzzling. The introduction states that the experimental drug "causes minimal side effects." The piece ends with an observation, "Seven...

Hard stuff: cooked diamonds don't dent.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... Popping diamonds into a high-pressure oven for a few minutes can render the famously hard minerals even harder, researchers have found. In particular, pressure-cooking a recently developed type of synthetic diamond has yielded the hardest...

Toss out the toss-up: bias in heads-or-tails.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... If you want to decide which football team takes the ball first or who gets the larger piece of cake, the fairest thing is to toss a coin, right? Not necessarily. A new mathematical analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently biased:...

Wrenching findings: homing in on dark energy.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... Something is pulling the universe apart, causing galaxies to flee from each other at an ever-faster rate. Since 1998, when astronomers discovered this bewildering state of affairs, theorists have been struggling to comprehend the mysterious...

Fox selection: bottleneck survivors show surprising variety.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... Foxes native to a California island--and famous for having the least genetic diversity ever reported in a sexually reproducing animal--have some variation after all. The San Nicolas Island foxes (Urocyon littoralis dickeyi) vary...

Song sung blue: in brain, music and language overlap.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... Music may be a balm for the soul and, in Shakespeare's words, the food of love. It may also convey specific meaning much as language does, a new study suggests. Different classical-music passages facilitate thinking about specific verbal...

Old colonies: ancient formations are termites' legacy.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... New analyses of mysterious pillars at two sites in southern Africa suggest that the sandstone features are petrified remains of large, elaborate termite nests--the oldest such fossils yet discovered, scientists say. The pillars have eroded...

Averting pain: epilepsy drug limits migraine attacks.(This Week)
February 28, 2004... A drug normally used against epilepsy can prevent migraine headaches, according to two studies. The research trials are the first to test the drug topiramate in hundreds of migraine patients. The combined results are likely to push...

Straining for speed: in search of faster electronics, chip makers contort silicon crystals.
February 28, 2004... Hungry for details, dozens of microcircuit specialists surrounded Tahir Ghani after his talk last December at an annual microelectronics conference in Washington, D.C. Ghani, a senior-level engineer with the chip giant Intel in Hillsboro, Ore.,...

Inflammatory fat: unraveling the injurious biology of obesity.
February 28, 2004... The United States is big, and getting bigger each year--at least around its collective waistline. Federal statistics indicate that as of 2001, one in five U.S. adults was obese. That s roughly 45 million people. Almost twice that many fall into...

Blocked gene gives mice super smell.(Neuroscience)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2004... Time to hide the cheese. Researchers have created a mutant mouse strain whose sense of smell is much sharper and more sensitive than that of typical mice. Oddly enough, they did so by inactivating a gene in the rodents, not by adding one. ...

How agriculture ground to a start.(Archaeology)(Brief Article)
February 28, 2004... Scientists would love to know how western Asians made the revolutionary shift from seed scrounging to cereal cultivation around 11,000 years ago. Some researchers speculate that the shift occurred after people began using sickles to cut down...