Science News articles from July 2003

Science News archives from July 2003

First five-quark particle turns up. (Wild Bunch).
July 5, 2003... Physicists on three international teams have recently spotted what's most likely a long-sought subatomic particle known as a pentaquark. It contains five components--four quarks and one antiquark--which are among the most fundamental bits of...

Mutated fruit flies bypass the salt. (A Matter of Taste).
July 5, 2003... People's fondness for salty snacks reflects a fundamental biological imperative. "All cells, in order to survive, need salt," says Lei Liu of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. To keep themselves...

Tracing the rise of dengue fever in the Americas. (Lethal Emergence).
July 5, 2003... A spate of deadly outbreaks of dengue fever in Latin America in recent years stems from the 1994 arrival of a potent version of the disease that is endemic to India, genetic analyses of viruses reveal. That viral incursion followed the 1981...

Beetles navigate by lunar polarity. (Moonlighting).
July 5, 2003... By watching dung beetles roll their balls of dung at night, an international team of researchers has turned up evidence that the insect aligns its path by detecting the polarization of moonlight. When researchers set up polarizing filters...

Elderly caregivers show harmful immune effect. (Till IL-6 Do Us Part).
July 5, 2003... Seniors whose lives revolve around caring for their incapacitated spouses often feel older than their years. It may be more than a feeling, according to a new study. Over a 6-year period, marital Samaritans caring for a spouse with...

Antibiotics fed to animals drift in air. (Suspended Drugs).
July 5, 2003... Drugs added to animal feed can latch onto dust particles that become airborne and float through farm buildings, according to German scientists investigating health risks. Such antibiotics could be toxic if livestock workers inhale them and also...

Van Gogh painting put on the calendar. (Timing a Moonrise).(facts about the painting of 'Moonrise')
July 5, 2003... Partially hidden by mountains, a glowing orange orb rises over golden stacks of wheat. Vincent van Gogh's "Moonrise" depicts a scene in Provence with the painter's unmistakable palette of brilliant, swirling colors. Historians have long...

Microbial materials: scientists co-opt viruses, bacteria, and fungi to build new structures.(use of microbes)
July 5, 2003... Bone. Nerve. Muscle. Horn. Hide. Silk. With ingenious assemblages of atoms and molecules, biology produces fantastic substances that have long inspired scientists to develop the synthetic materials of the modern landscape. Lately, materials...

The ultimate colonists: human ancestors settled into one ecosystem after another.(Stone Age evolution)
July 5, 2003... The Stone Age was rough on community life, at least among animals trying to make a living in Africa. A range of species would move into a local habitat--gazelles, zebras, pigs, people, you name it--and take a few generations to establish the...

Second cancer type linked to shift work. (Environment).(breast cancer and colorectal cancer risks)(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... Two years ago, a pair of research teams each reported finding an elevated risk of breast cancer among women who sometimes worked nightshirts. One of the teams now finds that those women also face an increased risk of colorectal cancer. Eva...

Satellites show Earth is greener. (Earth Science).(chlorophyll levels)(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... Daily observations from space for nearly 2 decades indicate that our planet is getting greener. Satellites gathered data from 1982 to 1999, measuring the amount of chlorophyll on Earth. Analyses show that Earth's net primary production--a...

Sumo wrestling keeps big ants in line. (Zoology).(Malaysian ants, Acanthomyrmex ferox)(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... In a Malaysian ant species, scientists are reporting that the large workers fight among themselves in "spectacular shaking contests." The workers of Acanthomyrmex ferox include a class of extra-large hulks, called majors. These female ants...

Monitoring radiation with Britney Spears? (Health Physics).(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... Here's a potential use for unwanted or damaged compact disks: Set them aside as home radon detectors. Radon is a radioactive gas that can accumulate in homes as it seeps from the soil or from building material, such as stone. Some studies...

Magnetic current flows solo. (Physics).(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... Besides possessing an electric charge, every electron totes around a tiny magnetic field that points either up or down. The particle's magnetism arises from a quantum mechanical property called spin. Now, an international team of physicists has...

Tobacco treaty penned. (Science & Society).(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... Every day, people around the world light up some 15 billion cigarettes. This addiction to tobacco has reached epidemic proportions, according to the World Health Organization in Geneva. In hopes of curbing the escalating health and economic...

Strict regimen pays off years later. (Physiology).(control of diabetes)(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... Diabetes patients who adhered to a tight program of blood sugar control over nearly 7 years starting in the 1980s are still showing heart benefits, even though most have slipped back into a less diligent routine of blood-sugar monitoring. ...

Epilepsy drug eases diabetes woes. (Biomedicine).(topiramate)(Brief Article)
July 5, 2003... The epilepsy drug topiramate can alleviate intense finger and toe pain in people with diabetes and also seems to help them lose weight, two studies show. Diabetes is the most common cause of neuropathy, a condition in which poor blood flow...

Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs.(Book Review)
July 5, 2003... SAMUEL BARONDES Thirty years ago, psychiatrists generally prescribed medications to people with the most serious mental conditions. Today, Barondes reports, more than 100 million people around the world take psychiatric drugs. Here, he...

The Big Splat: Or How Our Moon Came to Be.(Book Review)
July 5, 2003... DANA MACKENZIE For 400 years or so, scientists have toiled over the exact origins of Earth's moon. Even once humans set foot there, the mystery was still not solved. Some astrophysicists argued that the moon was ripped from a rapidly...

The Enigmas of Easter Island.(Book Review)
July 5, 2003... JOHN FLENLEY AND PAUL BAHN Located in the middle of the South Pacific, 2,250 miles from Chile and 2,171 miles from the Galapagos Islands (its closest neighbors), Easter Island is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth and a...

Natural Gardening in Small Spaces.(Book Review)
July 5, 2003... NOEL KINGSBURY Kingsbury details scores of gardens that are friendly both to the environment and to wildlife and can be planted in rooftop containers, borders, or a small portion of a larger yard. The author imparts a working knowledge of...

The One True Platonic Heaven: A Scientific Fiction on the Limits of Knowledge.(Book Review)
July 5, 2003... JOHN L. CASTI In the spirit of his book The Cambridge Quartet, in which Casti gave voice to such scientists as Alan Turing and Edwin Schrodinger in a mock discussion about artificial intelligence, the author here assembles a new cast of...

One man's opinion. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
July 5, 2003... I was diagnosed 12 years ago with Klinefelter's syndrome, which has as a symptom low testosterone ("Unproven Elixir," SN: 5/10/03, p. 296). After starting bimonthly injections of testosterone, I experienced some mild body changes but nothing...

Down to it. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
July 5, 2003... "Going Down? Probe could ride to Earth's core in a mass of molten iron" (SN: 5/17/03, p. 307) neglects the most difficult problem associated with sending a probe to the vicinity of Earth's core: sending the information back. Even a few feet of...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
July 5, 2003... In "Cancer vaccine gets first test in patients" (SN: 6/21/03, p. 398), the vaccine name was misspelled. It should have been TRICOM.

A planet from the early universe. (Record Breaker).
July 12, 2003... Astronomers have found the oldest and most distant planet known in the universe. Residing 7,200 light-years away, the planet weighs 2.5 times as much as Jupiter and formed when the universe was an infant, Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania...

Ancient poop yields nuclear DNA. (Secrets of Dung).
July 12, 2003... Researchers have extracted remnants of DNA from an unlikely source: the desiccated dung of an extinct ground sloth that lived in Nevada at the height of the last ice age. The feat is the first recovery of genetic material from cell nuclei of...

City trees grow bigger than country cousins. (Double Trees).
July 12, 2003... A popular tree grows twice as well in the New York metropolitan sprawl as in rural New York State, according to a new test. Clones of an Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) in the Bronx and other city spots grew to double the biomass of...

Asbestos exposure is prevalent in mining community. (More Than a Miner Problem).
July 12, 2003... A new study of the residents of Libby, Mont., confirms that even people who don't work with asbestos can have lung abnormalities caused by the mineral. The "striking, very disturbing" findings indicate that asbestos released from mining or...

Altered genes show up in Lou Gehrig's disease. (DNA Differences Add Risk).
July 12, 2003... Scientists' best efforts have failed to vanquish amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). There was no cure for the nerve-degenerating disease when it struck down baseball star Lou Gehrig 64 years ago, and there is none today. In fact, scientists...

Soft blow hardens Columbia-disaster theory. (This Week).(cause of break up of space shuttle)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 12, 2003... On Monday, NASA brought a dramatic conclusion to tests aimed at determining why the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on Feb. 1, killing all seven crew members. A block of foam insulation fired from a gun at more than 800 kilometers per hour...

Burning peat underlies Mali's hot ground. (Digging for Fire).
July 12, 2003... In regions of northern Mall, the parched ground is punctuated with smoking, glowing holes that reach 750[degrees]C at their rims. Locals have long attributed the appearance of these holes and the superheated ground around them to evil spirits...

Udder beauty: ensuring that dairy queens are selected for their natural splendor.
July 12, 2003... The scourge of udder tampering has not escaped the attention of humorist Dave Barry. In one of his columns, he laments unscrupulous dairy farmers who inject foreign udder-enhancing substances into their animals' mammary glands in a desperate...

All the world's a phage: viruses that eat bacteria abound--and surprise.(bacteriophages)
July 12, 2003... Smaller than bacteria, some of them look like microscopic spacecraft. You can find them almost anywhere' under a rosebush or miles out to sea. These strange entities are bacteriophages, viruses that prey upon bacteria, and there's a staggering...

Flight burns less fuel than stopovers. (Zoology).(songbird flight)(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... The first measurements of energy use in migrating songbirds have confirmed a paradox predicted by some computer models of bird migration: Birds burn more energy during stopovers along the way than during their total flying time. Martin...

U.S. survey probes depression care. (Behavior).(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... More than half of all people with major depression now seek treatment for the disorder, up from about one-third a decade ago. Even so, only 1 in 5 depressed people receives adequate antidepressant medication and psychotherapy, according to a...

Let there be light. (Biochemistry).(effects of ultraviolet light on RNA )(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... Many scientists suspect that ribonucleic acid, or RNA, preceded DNA and served as life's first genetic material. Yet it's never been clear how long strands of RNA, or DNA for that matter, could form in the harsh conditions of the primordial...

Crop genes diffuse in seedy ways. (Botany).(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... Sugar beets in French farm fields are less likely to spread their genes to wild relatives by wafting pollen than by releasing seeds that people unintentionally transport, according to a new genetic study. The finding could complicate debates...

Adults' brains show temperamental side. (Neuroscience).(research of the amygdala )(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... Using brain-imaging techniques, psychologists have identified possible neural locations underlying shyness or gregariousness. Thirteen people in their early 20s whom the psychologists had categorized as inhibited during infancy displayed...

Antimosquito coils release toxic fumes. (Environment).(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... In places with nocturnal mosquitoes, many people burn spiral-shaped strips of insecticide-treated plant matter near their beds. These mosquito coils smolder through the night to keep bugs at bay, but they can also cause asthma and wheezing in...

Giving solar cells the rough treatment. (Technology).(materials to make solar cells)(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... Researchers in Germany have modified standard solar cell designs so that they can be made from cheaper materials. That could be important, because price has long been a major obstacle to wider use of photovoltaics. Typically in commercial...

Killer sex, literally. (Zoology).(yellow garden spider behavior)(Brief Article)
July 12, 2003... Videotapes of yellow garden spiders show that if a female doesn't murder her mate, he'll expire during sex anyway. "As far as we know, it's the first time anyone has shown males spontaneously dying during copulation," says Daphne J....

The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy.(Book Review)
July 12, 2003... FULVIO MELIA New, improved, and high-powered telescopes are finally lifting the veil from the Milky Way's core. Astronomers have discovered, behind this shroud of thick dust, a dark entity devouring everything around it. Although the...

Isaac Newton.(Book Review)
July 12, 2003... JAMES GLEICK Gleick is known for simply titled books with fascinating content and clear exposition, including Chaos, Faster, and Genius--a biography of Richard Feynman. Now, the author turns his attention to another of science's famous...

Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology.(Book Review)
July 12, 2003... EDWARD TENNER The author of Why Things Bite Back considers how everyday inventions such as sandals, reclining chairs, and helmets affect how we use our bodies--how we sit, stand, walk, and communicate--and how those actions in turn affect...

The Secret Life of Sharks: A Leading Marine Biologist Reveals the Mysteries of Shark Behavior.(Book Review)
July 12, 2003... A. PETER KLIMLEY Most beachgoers sweat not only the sun but also the sharks they imagine are lurking in the water. Movies such as Jaws have tainted our view of these creatures, leading us to believe that sharks are "dumb feeding machines"...

The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox.(Book Review)
July 12, 2003... JENNIFER LEE CARRELL By the time smallpox was eradicated in 1977, it had taken hundreds of millions of lives. It killed more people than the Black Death and all the wars of the 20th century combined. Carrell takes readers back to the 1720s...

The truth is out there. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
July 12, 2003... "Patterns from Nowhere" (SN: 5/17/03, p. 314) was very interesting. While hiking in terrains ranging from midwestern prairies to alpine environments, I've seen different forms of buckling due to freezing forces. Though evaporation was given a...

Get right back up. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
July 12, 2003... The discovery that humans share 99.4 percent of their genetic sequences with chimps does not make chimps like us in any meaningful sense or lower "humanity's pedestal" in the slightest degree ("Humanity's pedestal lowered again?" SN: 5/31/03,...

Armed with a new gene, spuds fend off blight. (Stout Potatoes).
July 19, 2003... It has been more than 150 years since the Irish potato famine, when the funguslike disease called blight annihilated the staple food for millions of people. But blight is still the most serious potato disease in Europe, the United States, and...

Absent dads linked to early sex by daughters. (Where's Poppa?).
July 19, 2003... Teenage girls in the United States and New Zealand show a particularly strong tendency to engage in sexual activity and to get pregnant if they grew up in families without a father present, a new long-term study finds. "These findings may...

Cancers follow shrinkage of chromosomes' tips. (Split Ends).
July 19, 2003... Molecular caps that normally protect the ends of chromosomes shrink in many cells that later turn cancerous, according to a new study in people. Just as shoelaces that lose their plastic tips unravel, so may chromosomes with broken tips,...

Atmosphere blocks many small stony asteroids. (Protective Blanket).
July 19, 2003... Although Earth and the moon inhabit the same cosmic neighborhood, our planet has far fewer scars from extraterrestrial impacts because incoming objects burn up in its atmosphere. A new computer model suggests that Earth's thin layer of air is...

Birds sing higher near urban traffic. (City Song).
July 19, 2003... City songbirds that stake out territories near loud traffic tend to pitch their songs at higher frequencies than do birds in quieter neighborhoods, Dutch researchers have found. Recordings of a common European species, the great tit (Parus...

Polymers on silicon chip catch, release proteins. (Tiny Labs).
July 19, 2003... Using polymers as tiny molecule-absorbing sponges, researchers have taken a step toward shrinking room-size chemical laboratories to the size of a crumb. Microchips full of tiny channels and mixing chambers may eventually enable scientists...

Cadmium mimics estrogen's effects, thwarts DNA repair. (Metal's Mayhem).
July 19, 2003... Trace amounts of cadmium can mimic estrogen's effects on cells and alter the reproductive system of female rats, a new study shows. The finding may expand the rap sheet on cadmium--already fingered in lung cancer and kidney damage--to include...

Amino acid proves key to plant reproduction. (Down the Tubes).
July 19, 2003... Scientists have discovered that one of the myriad signals that human brain cells use to communicate also enables flowering plants to have sex. This versatile substance, an amino acid known as amino butyric acid or GABA, appears to help pollen...

Supernova spectacular: starburst galaxies shed light on the early universe.
July 19, 2003... Peering deep into the maelstrom of two colliding galaxies, astronomers have discovered a cluster of massive stars exploding like fire-crackers. From what they've seen, researchers estimate that in this pair of merging galaxies, dubbed Arp 299,...

Learning from the present: fresh bones could provide insight into Earth's patchy fossil record.
July 19, 2003... Several meters away, through the wavering heat of a desert afternoon, a paleontologist spies what looks like a thumb-size chip of bone. As he approaches the relic, he wonders what it will be: A piece of leg bone? A fragment of skull? A chunk of...

Lucy's kind takes humanlike turn. (Anthropology).(Australopithiecus afarensis research )(Brief Article)
July 19, 2003... In a line of human ancestors that lived more than 3 million years ago, adult males were only around 15 percent larger than adult females, a new study finds. Such a moderate sex difference in Australopithecus afarensis suggests that males in the...

An inexpensive catalyst generates hydrogen. (Chemistry).(Brief Article)
July 19, 2003... When it comes to cleanliness, fossil fuels can't compete with hydrogen gas, which produces only water when it burns. But getting the hydrogen in the first place isn't so clean. Unless energy researchers overcome several stumbling blocks--such...

Viral protein could help liver therapy. (Biomedicine).(Brief Article)
July 19, 2003... Researchers experimenting with a protein from hepatitis B virus have developed a new technique for delivering therapeutic genes to the liver while minimizing the accidental introduction of genes to other tissues. The ideal delivery system...

Gas sensor uses nanotube parts. (Materials Science).(Brief Article)
July 19, 2003... Ever since the discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991, scientists have been trying to put the tiny cylinders to work. Now, researchers have incorporated them into a gas sensor for potential uses that range from environmental monitoring at...

Revved-up antics of a pulsar jet. (Astronomy).(particles from Vela, a collapsed star)(Brief Article)
July 19, 2003... Whipping around like an out-of-control tire hose, a mammoth jet of charged particles gushing from a collapsed star is varying its shape and brightness more rapidly than any other known jet in the heavens. The jet, a half light-year in...

Counting calories on the road. (Technology).(Brief Article)
July 19, 2003... People seem innately programmed to devote a fixed amount of metabolic energy--an average of 240 calories, or the energy in a hot dog--to traveling around each day, according to an analysis of the habits of thousands of people in England. That's...

Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability.(Book Review)
July 19, 2003... PETER PESIC At 21 years of age, Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel proved that algebraic equations of the fifth order are not solvable in radicals. As did many other authors of great works produced at the turn of the 18th century, Abel had...

Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human.(Book Review)
July 19, 2003... MATT RIDLEY The author of the best-seller Genome, turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate and promptly dismisses it. The evidence, Ridley asserts, is that heredity and environment are inextricably intertwined influences on...

The Path: A One-Mile Walk through the Universe.(Book Review)
July 19, 2003... CHET RAYMO Many of us make daily treks over the same stretch of road or land without giving a single thought to what's around us. For the past 37 years, Raymo has walked a 1-mile path from his house in North Easton. Mass., to Stonehill...

The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids.(Book Review)
July 19, 2003... BARBARA STRAUCH Parents of teenagers often think that something strange has happened in their children's minds, something that makes them at best difficult to handle and at worst irrational. Strauch, a health-and-medical writer for the New...

The Secrets of Wildflowers: A Delightful Feast of Little-Known Facts, Folklore, and History.(Book Review)
July 19, 2003... JACK SANDERS From meadows to parking lots, wildflowers are North America's most abundant plant. They're so common that we're apt to look right past them. Nevertheless, Sanders celebrates more than 100 varieties of wildflowers and explores...

Science news for kids. (Editor's Letter).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
July 19, 2003... Next week, Science News will launch a stunning Web site to make science accessible to young people. We will offer timely, kid-friendly news items, along with brainteasers and games, hands-on activities, and resources for teachers and parents....

Treatment for colitis shows early success. (Intestinal Fortitude).
July 26, 2003... The cells that line the gastrointestinal tract, among other responsibilities, keep the immune system from reacting to bacteria and food in the gut. In people with ulcerative colitis, however, breaches in this epithelial cell layer bring immune...

Elderly helpers have longevity advantage. (Giving Aid, Staying Alive).
July 26, 2003... The old saying that it's better to give than to receive may be true, at least when it comes to social support. Over a 5-year period, seniors who provided either a lot of practical assistance to friends, relatives, and neighbors or regular...

Seafloor system has been active for ages. (Long-Term Ocean Venting).
July 26, 2003... Analyses of mineral deposits in and around a unique set of hydrothermal vents beneath the Atlantic Ocean suggest that the site's tallest towers of minerals have been growing for at least 30,000 years. The vent system, dubbed the Lost City...

Surveying the universe's middle-aged galaxies. (Sky Prospecting).
July 26, 2003... With a year's worth of data now in hand from a telescope survey of thousands of galaxies 6 to 8 billion light-years away, astronomers are filling in details about the midlife years of the nearly 14-billion-year-old universe. "We're looking...

Coaxing light beams out of cheap plastic. (Press 'n' Peel Lasers).
July 26, 2003... Like poker chips, lasers may someday be molded out of plastic by the millions. A new laser-making method takes a major step in that direction, its Austrian developers say. Lasers are devices that emit a coherent beam of light of a single...

Taking the Crab's pulse.(observations of the Crab pulsar star)(Brief Article)
July 26, 2003... Sweeping beams of radiation from rapidly spinning stars called pulsars vary in intensity. No one knows why. Simultaneous recordings of the Crab pulsar's visible light, shown in these images to the right of another star, and its radio emissions...

Platelets in blood may guide immune response. (Beyond Clots).
July 26, 2003... When blood spills, the human body calls on platelets. These cells quickly plug the damaged region of a blood vessel and initiate clotting. There's more to platelets than clots, however. The bloodborne cells can also stimulate the immune...

Nanotubes central to new rotating device. (Miniature Motor).
July 26, 2003... Motors, pumps, and other electromechanical devices are tinier than ever--and getting even smaller. Now, for the first time, researchers have used miniature, nested cylinders, called multiwalled carbon nanotubes, to make a motor that's only 300...

Mastering the mixer: the frustrating physics of cake mix and concrete.
July 26, 2003... Part of the fun of experimenting with granular materials, says Stephen W. Morris, is the showmanship. In one stunt that he has demonstrated in settings ranging from high school classrooms to television studios, the University of Toronto...

Catch zero: what can be done as marine ecosystems face a deepening crisis?(depletion of fiish populations)
July 26, 2003... Give a man a fish, goes the Chinese proverb, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. If he catches too many fish, however, he may leave few fish behind for his children's table. It has taken less than a...

Dusty times on Mars. (Astronomy).(Brief Article)
July 26, 2003... On July 1, a dust cloud emerged from Mars' Hellas Basin, a crater that ranks as one of the biggest in the solar system. Just 3 days later, the cloud had become 1,800 kilometers wide, roughly one-fourth the Red Planet's diameter. Two years...

Keeping breathing steady and safe. (Biomedicine).(when using opiates as painkillers and anesthetics)(Brief Article)
July 26, 2003... Opiates, including morphine and fentanyl, are powerful painkillers and anesthetics, but they also can slow a person's breathing to a dangerous rate. Scientists studying the kernel of brain cells that controls a body's breathing rhythm may have...

Herbal therapy may carry cancer danger. (Alternative Medicine).(Brief Article)
July 26, 2003... An herbal extract that some women use to relieve symptoms of menopause increases the likelihood in mice with breast cancer that the disease will spread, researchers have found. The extract, called black cohosh, is especially popular among...