Science News articles from March 2004

Science News archives from March 2004

Rover finds gush of evidence for past water.(Red Planet Makes a Splash)(NASA)
March 6, 2004... A robotic rover on Mars has gathered what scientists are calling the best evidence to date that liquid water once flowed on the Red Planet, soaking rocks thoroughly enough to create possible niches for life. The combination of images and...

Lotion speeds DNA repair, protects mice from skin cancer.(Sunny Solution)
March 6, 2004... It's not always fun in the sun. Dermatologists warn that not even the best sunscreens prevent all the potentially cancer-causing damage that ultraviolet light (UV) does to skin. A new study, however, suggests that incorporating certain snippets...

First bird genome is decoded.(Jungle Genes)
March 6, 2004... An international research team this week unveiled a draft of the first bird genome to be sequenced. It comes from a vintage chicken. The red junglefowl, native to Southeast Asia, belongs to the same species as the world's domesticated...

Humanity's roots may lie in single, diverse genus.(Early Ancestors Come Together)
March 6, 2004... Six newly discovered fossil teeth from the hominid Ardipithecus, which lived in eastern Africa more than 5 million years ago, have sharpened the scientific debate about our evolutionary origins. Analyses of the 5.6-to-5.8-million-year-old...

Once-maligned claim rebounds.(Bubble Fusion)
March 6, 2004... By blowing bubbles and then crushing them with sound waves, a tabletop gadget appears to force atomic nuclei to fuse, a process usually requiring temperatures and pressures found in stars and thermonuclear explosions. "For the first time in...

Hybrid mosquitoes spread West Nile virus.(Worst of Two Worlds)
March 6, 2004... Mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus in North America are a blend of two strains that remain essentially distinct in the Old World, researchers report. Interbreeding may explain why the insects often bite both birds and people in North...

Impact crater may predate extinction of the dinosaurs.(Lowering the Boom?)
March 6, 2004... Analyses of sediments from hundreds of meters beneath the Yucatan suggest that an extraterrestrial object's impact there more than 65 million years ago--the punch that many scientists propose wiped out the dinosaurs--actually happened about...

Killer waves: scientists are learning how to predict tsunami risk.(Cover Story)
March 6, 2004... Last Nov. 16, at 8:43 p.m., a magnitude--7.5 earthquake struck deep beneath the ocean near Alaska's Little Sitkin Island, far out in the Aleutian Islands. Within 25 minutes, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)...

Body builders: using stem cells to cultivate organs.(Johns Hopkins University)
March 6, 2004... The field of tissue engineering has long been fraught with hope and hype. For the past several decades, laboratory scientists have pursued the ambitious goal of growing new organs and tissues--a heart, say, or a piece of spinal cord--that a...

Keeping abreast of serotonin's roles.(Biology)(Brief Article)
March 6, 2004... Biologists studying mice have unexpectedly found that the well-known brain chemical serotonin also controls the secretion of milk within mammary glands. Serotonin is one molecule that nerve cells use to communicate with each other. The...

Pulsar pas de deux.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
March 6, 2004... Pulsars are the whirling dervishes of stars. These ultracompact bodies rotate hundreds of times each second, sweeping radio waves across space. One pulsar is exotic enough, but a closely orbiting pair offers more than double the information...

Gene transfer puts good fats in mammals.(Food And Nutrition)(Brief Article)
March 6, 2004... Aiming ultimately to make healthier beef, eggs, and other farm products, scientists have used a worm gene to genetically engineer mice whose tissues are unusually rich in the heart-healthy fats found mainly in fish. Compared with red meat...

Quantum sentinels.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
March 6, 2004... Quantum physics may soon help physicians track whether a cancer has spread. In experiments in mice and pigs, a team of chemists and surgeons has used quantum dots--nanometer-scale crystals that emit light--to refine lymph node biopsies. ...

Silicon goes optical.(Technology)(Brief Article)
March 6, 2004... Specialized components that send and receive light signals across optical fibers are usually made from exotic crystals or semiconductor materials that are expensive and hard to work with. Now, researchers have unveiled a component that can do...

Clean hydrogen fuel from corn?(Energy)(Brief Article)
March 6, 2004... Future vehicles and electric generators powered by fuel cells could eventually run on hydrogen derived from corn. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, have come up with an efficient method of converting ethanol, the alcohol...

The Complete Natural Medicine Guide to the 50 Most Common Medicinal Herbs.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 6, 2004... HEATHER BOON AND MICHAEL SMITH TWO Canadian pharmacists team up to define not only what the most common medicinal herbs are but also what they are not. Boon and Smith profile 50 of the most common herbal products. Entries include a...

Insect-Lo-Pedia.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 6, 2004... MATTHEW REINHART Budding entomologists learn the habits and features of a variety of common insects through colorful Illustrations and text that defines how insects such as ants, ladybugs, and wasps communicate, defend themselves, and...

The Science Of Good And Evil: Why "People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 6, 2004... MICHAEL SHERMER This is the third title in what has turned out to be a trilogy of books on the nature of belief--the first two are How We Believe and Why People Believe Weird Things. In this installment, Shermer considers whether it's in...

Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 6, 2004... HELEN FISHER Anyone who has experienced the ecstasy of love has probably also felt the anguish of being rebuffed or falling out of love. In this book, Fisher turns a scientist's eye on feelings that are usually the realm of poets and...

Visions of the Cosmos.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 6, 2004... CAROLYN COLLINS PETERSEN AND JOHN C. BRANDT Nearly 10 years ago, the authors published a book featuring the amazing images being sent back to Earth by the Hubble Space Telescope. That hook was titled Hubble Vision. NOW, they expand their...

All we have to fear.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 6, 2004... In "9/11's Fatal Road Toll: Terror attacks presaged rise in U.S. car deaths" (SN: 1/17/04, p. 37), it was assumed that people who switched from planes to cars after the terrorist attacks did so because of fear. However, many people who switched...

Fear itself.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 6, 2004... I'm sure the new therapies, including drug therapy, outlined in "Fear Not" (SN: 1/17/04, p. 42) will greatly help many people. I was unhappy, however, to see that the drug D-cycloserine was going to be used to help people overcome their fear of...

Stem cells may make new eggs in women.(Scrambled Dogma)
March 13, 2004... Scientists may have to come up with a new explanation for how a woman's biological clock works. A study in mice appears to overturn the long-held assumption that female mammals are born with all the eggs they'll ever have. Researchers have...

All primates may share expanded frontal cortex.(Brain Size Surprise)
March 13, 2004... Researchers have traditionally theorized that the frontal cortex, a brain region linked to mental faculties such as planning and reasoning, expanded to an unprecedented extent during human evolution. However, a new analysis of brains from many...

Hubble lakes ultralong look at the cosmos.(Deepest Vision Yet)
March 13, 2004... Astronomers this week unveiled the deepest visible-light portrait of the universe ever made. Compiled by the Hubble Space Telescope as it stared into a narrow corridor of space more than 13 billon light-years long, the mosaic of images also...

Novel drugs slow two cancers in mice.(Shutting Off an On Switch)
March 13, 2004... One way to arrest cancer is to identify a molecule that malignant cells just can't do without--and then disable it. Researchers now report success with two experimental drugs that target such a protein, which triggers rapid growth and other...

Fuel cell draws energy from waste.(Special Treatment)
March 13, 2004... A team of environmental engineers at Pennsylvania State University has created a fuel cell that breaks down organic matter in wastewater and, in the process, generates small amounts of electricity. The researchers say this dual activity...

Fish, flesh feed gout, but milk counters it.(Meat of the Matter)
March 13, 2004... Alexander the Great had it. Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin also suffered from what was once known as the "patrician malady." Their common affliction was gout, an arthritic condition that causes spells of intense pain, most often in the...

First butterfly that's genetically modified.(New Green Eyes)
March 13, 2004... Scientists have for the first time genetically engineered a butterfly, inserting a jellyfish gene into an African butterfly so that its eyes fluoresce green. The butterfly, Bicyclus anynana, serves as an important subject for studies of...

Born to heal: screening embryos to treat siblings raises hopes, dilemmas.(Cover Story)
March 13, 2004... A decade later, pediatrician John E. Wagner still remembers the international phone call that led him to pioneer a new, controversial means to treat certain serious blood diseases. In his office at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis,...

A new flight plan: back to the moon.
March 13, 2004... After going in circles around our own planet for more than 30 years, astronauts may finally have gotten permission to leave home. In January, President Bush unveiled an ambitious plan for a manned mission to Mars, using the moon as a testing...

Radioactive sprinkles keep machines true.(Physics)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Radioactivity-detecting medical scanners, such as positron emission tomography (PET) imagers, are becoming so sharp-eyed that it's more challenging than ever to find the limits of the machines' vision. Doing this requires uniform radiation...

Cinching nanotubes into tough fibers.(Materials Science)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Heralded as the strongest known structures, carbon nanotubes have caught the attention and imagination of scientists around the world. Resembling teeny sheets of chicken wire rolled into tubes, the nanoscale structures could produce tougher and...

New champions among corrosive microbes.(Chemistry)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... In another example of the deep sea's largely unexplored biodiversity, scientists have discovered two new strains of bacteria that corrode iron with unprecedented efficiency. In marine environments that are oxygen poor, certain bacteria are...

Deep Pacific waters warmed in recent years.(Oceanography)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Oceanographic data gathered across the North Pacific in 1985 and again in 1999 indicate that the deepest waters there have been heating up. In trans-Pacific research cruises, scientists measured the ocean's temperature, salinity, and other...

Extinct ancestor wasn't so finicky.(Anthropology)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Many anthropologists assume that from around 3 million to 1 million years ago, the human evolutionary family consisted of two sharply contrasting lineages. The genus Homo adapted flexibly to new environments and ate a variety of foods,...

Pompeii debris yields calamity clues.(Earth Science)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Geologists have used the magnetic characteristics of rocks and debris excavated from Pompeii to estimate the searing temperatures of the cloud of volcanic ash that suddenly smothered the Italian city in A.D. 79. When molten rocks solidify,...

Two arthritis drugs work best in tandem.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Two anti-inflammatory drugs for rheumatoid arthritis work better together than either does individually, researchers report in the Feb. 28 Lancet. The scientists randomly assigned one-third of 682 arthritis sufferers to receive...

Diesel fumes suppress immune response.(Environment)(Brief Article)
March 13, 2004... Recurring exposure to soot particles from diesel exhaust reduces the immune system's capacity to fend off infection more persistently than does a one-time exposure to an equivalent amount of particles, tests on rodents indicate. Inhaling...

American Inventions; a History of Carious, Extraordinary, and Just Plain Useful Patents.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 13, 2004... AMERICAN INVENTIONS; A History of Carious, Extraordinary, and Just Plain Useful Patents STEPHEN VAN DULKEN Van Dulken views U.S. history from the vantage point of the U.S. Patent Office. Drawings and information gleaned from hundreds...

Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale's Truths.(Books)(Book Review)
March 13, 2004... BELUGA DAYS: Tracking a White Whale's Truths NANCY LORD Scientists consider the beluga whales of Cook Inlet--the long estuary reaching up through southcentral Alaska--unique because they don't mix with other whales of their kind. This...

Dizzy: What You Need to Know about Managing and Treating Balance Disorders.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 13, 2004... DIZZY: What You Need to Know about Managing and Treating Balance Disorders JACK J. WAZEN WITH DEBORAH MITCHELL According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly half the people in the United States will seek help for dizziness or...

Gravity from the Ground Up: an Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity.(Books)(Book Review)
March 13, 2004... GRAVITY FROM THE GROUND UP: An Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity BERNARD SCHUTZ Although it has the look and feel of a textbook, this volume is actually a straightforward view of astronomy through the lens of...

Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big History.(Books)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 13, 2004... MAPS OF TIME: An Introduction to Big History DAVID CHRISTIAN Many scientists focus on specific spans of time in their pursuits. For instance, some researchers may study the 90 million years or so of the Cretaceous period, when...

Dry hole?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 13, 2004... "Tapping sun's light and heat to make hydrogen" (SN: 1/17/04, p. 46) seems to be delivering good news for the environment: "Clean" hydrogen can be produced from water using solar energy. This seems to me, however, to be even more horrifying...

Made in the shade.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 13, 2004... The political pseudoscience press strikes again ("Warming climate may slam many species," SN: 1/24/04, p. 62). Now, we are told that by 2050, as many as 31 percent of species will be wiped out by a temperature increase of 0.8 to 1.7[degrees]C....

Follow your dreams?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 13, 2004... Once again, we see evidence that supports what we knew all along ("Sleeper Effects: Slumber may fortify memory, stir insight," SN: 1/24/04, p. 53). As my mother told me growing up, "Just sleep on it." DAVID VARNER, PORTLAND, ORE.

Fancy colors.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 13, 2004... In regards to the picture accompanying "Pumping Carbon: Researchers watch nanofibers grow" (SN: 1/31/04, p. 69), it might be helpful to remind readers that such colorful depictions of nanoscale materials are slightly fanciful. These structures...

Solar system record breaker.(Planetoid on the Fringe)(Sedna)
March 20, 2004... Lurking more than 13 billion kilometers from Earth in the coldest, remotest part of the solar system, a newly discovered body lies three times farther from the sun than Pluto does. It's the most distant object ever found to orbit the sun and...

Odd RNA converts stem cells into neurons.(Brain Gain)
March 20, 2004... Like a bicycle messenger carrying blueprints across town, ribonucleic acid, or RNA, typically ferries protein-building instructions across a cell. Scientists exploring how brain cells form have found evidence that RNA does a lot more, however....

Synthetic molecule yields nanoscale rotor.(Mini Motor)
March 20, 2004... Over the past several years, researchers have made great strides in creating synthetic molecules that act as rudimentary computer switches (SN: 9/20/03,p. 182). But making something that produces motion--a motor--has proved much trickier. ...

Brain cancer patients short on valuable protein.(Gap in the Defense)
March 20, 2004... Brain-tumor cells have a dearth of an obscure protein whose sister compounds have shown anticancer effects, scientists report in the March 18 Nature. The protein is called p29 or ING4, shorthand for inhibitor of growth. After earlier...

DNA puts Neandertals on edge of human ancestry.(Prehistoric Family Split)
March 20, 2004... In the ongoing battle over their role in human evolution, Neandertals have taken another hit. An unprecedented amount of genetic material removed from Stone Age fossils indicates that the heavy-boned, beetle-browed Neandertals made, at most, a...

Eking more juice from batteries.(Iron Power)
March 20, 2004... Many of the rechargeable batteries that power cell phones, laptop computers, medical implants, and hybrid cars contain some of the same electrode technology that was used in Thomas Edison's day. Now, chemists have com up with a modern...

Search tool for a cancer cure places first in national science competition.(Top of the Top 40)
March 20, 2004... Inspired by his grandmother's battle with cancer, Herbert Mason Hedberg developed a new test that could rapidly identify tumor-fighting compounds. Remarkably, he accomplished this as a high school science project. Hedberg, 17, of North...

The bad seed: rare stem cells appear to drive cancers.
March 20, 2004... While some brain tumors are treatable, many are a speedy death sentence despite the best efforts of physicians. A neurosurgeon may carefully cut out every sign of a brain tumor, but new cancer cells quickly arise to take the original tumor's...

Mother and child disunion: don't take a mother's love for granted.(Cover Story)
March 20, 2004... Shortly after arriving in Taiwan in 1957, Stanford University anthropologist Arthur Wolf reached the rural village of Hsia-ch'i-chou. There, he met a weathered-looking woman who told an incredible story. Several decades previously, she had...

Revisiting a forgotten planet.(Astronomy)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... Engineers are readying a NASA spacecraft for a May 11 launch to one of the least-explored planets in the solar system. If all goes according to plan, the craft will begin orbiting Mercury, the surfs closest planet, in 2009 and take the first...

Hornbills know which monkey calls to heed.(Zoology)
March 20, 2004... The yellow-casqued hornbill, an African forest bird, can tell the difference between the alarm call that monkeys make in response to an approaching leopard, which is not a threat to the birds, and the monkey alarm triggered by a crowned eagle,...

Drug for migraines helps some patients.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... An experimental drug that slows blood flow in the brain knocks out migraine headaches in some people, researchers report in the March 11 New England Journal of Medicine. The drug, known only as BIBN 4096 BS so far, competes in the body...

Grannies give gift of longer lives.(Anthropology)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... Unlike the females of most species, women often live for decades after their childbearing years. A new study suggests that there's an evolutionary reason for granny's staying power. Grandmothers have traditionally helped care for their...

Complexity by way of simplicity.(Physics)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... In his controversial 2002 book A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media), theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram proposed that traditional science is incapable of fathoming many important phenomena in nature. The complexity of how galaxies formed or...

Heart patients gain from steep cholesterol drop.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... Heart patients can lessen their risk of a heart attack and increase their odds of survival by aggressively reducing harmful low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in their blood, a new study shows. Researchers identified 4,162 men and...

Road rage keeps ants moving smoothly.(Zoology)
March 20, 2004... Traffic scientists, specialists in nonlinear systems, and animal behaviorists have cooperated in a study of one of the natural geniuses of transportation engineering: the black garden ant of Europe. Ants don't have police officers or...

Ear piercings cause illness, disfigurement.(Biomedicine)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... Upper-ear piercings at a shopping mall kiosk in Oregon in 2000 caused a rash of infections in preteens and teenagers. A study of the outbreak suggests that upper-ear cartilage is more susceptible to bacterial infections than lobes are. ...

Movie sparks group brain responses.(Neuroscience)(Brief Article)
March 20, 2004... A crowd of moviegoers might each develop a unique opinion about the film they're all watching, but audience members exhibit a surprising amount of synchronized brain activity, a new study finds. Brains "tick collectively" as a group of...

The Book of Skin.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 20, 2004... The human body's largest organ is gaining visibility as ads and movies show ever more skin and as plastic surgery becomes more prevalent. On the basis of these trends, Connor considers skin from both symbolic and physiological perspectives to...

The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 20, 2004... Many readers are familiar with the framework of this story: J. Craig Venter broke away from the National Institutes of Health in the late 1990s to start a private venture that would go head-to-head with the government agency in the race to map...

Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 20, 2004... In the Permian Age, some 265 million years ago, mammallike reptiles called Therapsids, dominated the planet to the degree that people do today. Among the Therapsids was the gorgon, a 10-foot-long monster resembling a hybrid of lion and lizard....

Mars on Earth: the Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 20, 2004... The world is buzzing with news that President Bush is considering sending astronauts to Mars. Zubrin and his colleagues at the Mars Society have already laid the groundwork for such a journey. From 1999 to 2000, they conducted virtual...

The Radioactive Boy Scout: the True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor.(Books: a selection of new and notable books of scientific interest)(Book Review)
March 20, 2004... Silverstein elaborates on a true story he published in Harper's Magazine about a high school student taking the pursuit of his atomic energy Boy Scout badge to the next level. He built a nuclear-breeder reactor in his backyard. Silverstein...

What's the difference?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 20, 2004... I thought that the X and Y chromosomes determined gender in animals, but I see no mention of them in "When to Change Sex" (SN: 1/17/04, p. 40). Does this mean that on a genetic basis, males and females in these organisms are identical? ...

Curious exceptions.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 20, 2004... John Harris is quoted as saying that the absence of opossums is a "curious exception" to the list of current mammals of the Los Angeles Basin preserved in the La Brea tar pits ("L.A.'s Oldest Tourist Trap," SN: 1/24/04, p. 56). But the presence...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
March 20, 2004... Correction In "Killer Waves"(SN: 3/6/04, p. 152), the thickness of sand deposited by a tsunami south of Crescent City, Calif., in 1960 should have been given as 8.5 millimeters.

Gene change tied to ancestral brain gains.(Evolution's Lost Bite)
March 27, 2004... A genetic loss approximately 2.4 million years ago may have made cranial room for the bigger brains that characterize our direct evolutionary predecessors. That proposal comes from researchers who have discovered a DNA deletion that occurs in...

Oceans of data point to ancient Martian sea.(Signs of Water Flow)
March 27, 2004... A robotic rover on Mars has radioed to Earth strong evidence that some rocks near the Red Planet's equator formed from sediments in a shallow, ancient ocean. In announcing the finding, scientists have identified a promising site at which to...

New polymer ink writes tiny structures.(Miniaturized 3-D Printing)
March 27, 2004... A printing technique emulating the way spiders spin silk generates polymer microstructures a hundredth the size of those produced by existing three-dimensional printing technologies. The new fabrication scheme could prove to be a cheaper and...

Hysterectomy may top drugs for women with heavy bleeding.(Surgical Option)
March 27, 2004... Women who chronically have heavy menstrual periods face a difficult choice. Many cases of abnormal bleeding stem from a hormone imbalance, and drugs containing progesterone and estrogen often alleviate the problem. Medications don't always...

Thieving birds may drive canines to form big packs.(Wolf vs. Raven?)
March 27, 2004... Wolf packs often turn out to be bigger than predicted by the theories of animal behaviorists, and a new analysis points to a previously underappreciated factor: the scrounging genius of ravens. Observations of wolves for 27 winters on an...

Coastal surge: ecosystems likely to suffer as more people move to the shores.
March 27, 2004... The population of the United States in 2002 was about 288 million, up from nearly 249 million in 1990. That increase could spell trouble for ecosystems in coastal areas because population densities are increasing at faster rates in those places...

Fetal lungs tell mom when to deliver baby.(It's Time!)
March 27, 2004... One of the central unresolved questions in mammalian biology is how a mother knows when to give birth. Scientists studying mice have now found evidence that the maturing lungs of a fetus release a protein that initiates the process. If...

The social lives of snakes: from loner to attentive parent.
March 27, 2004... If the word snake pops into your mind in social situations, you're probably not thinking of a legless reptile. Indeed, the prevailing opinion among animal behaviorists for years was "very dogmatic that snakes weren't particularly social," says...

Forensics on trial: chemical matching of bullets comes under fire.
March 27, 2004... In 1997, a jury convicted Michael Behm of murdering a man in South River, N.J. The only physical evidence linking Behm to the murder was bullet fragments from the crime scene. An FBI examiner testified in court that the fragments chemically...

Golden waves make stretchy microcircuits.(Technology)(Brief Article)
March 27, 2004... More and more, sensors and other electronic gadgets are riddling the world--even our clothing and bodies. People developing this technology find themselves in need of circuitry that can conform to the changeable shapes of fabrics, tissues, and...