December 1996 Archives

31 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Black Widows Spin Super Silk

by Science News Staff

Albuquerque, New Mexico--Need a strong elastic fiber? Try black widow silk. The thread spun by these deadly spiders is several times as strong as any other known spider silk--making it...

31 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Immune Boost Wards Off Malaria

by Science News Staff

Scientists have found that a jolt from a versatile immune-system chemical, interleukin-12, protects monkeys from malaria. The findings, reported in the January issue of Nature Medicine, suggest that the chemical...

31 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Live Monkey AIDS Vaccine Safe After All?

by Science News Staff

A pilot study of a live vaccine against the monkey version of the AIDS virus may ease one fear about such vaccines: that they should never be used in newborns....

30 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Germany's Great Meter Man

by Science News Staff

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the birth of German physicist Johann Christian Poggendorf. Showing a talent for creating electronic instruments early in life, Poggendorf in 1821 invented the galvanometer,...

30 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Why Heat Makes Injured Tissue Hurt

by Science News Staff

Scientists have discovered a biochemical pathway that may explain why sunburns and other injuries ache when exposed to heat, says a report in the latest issue of The Proceedings of...

30 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Capturing a Phantom Force

by Science News Staff

Someone has finally managed to get something from nothing. In the current issue of Physical Review Letters, a physicist describes the first successful measurement of the Casimir force, a pressure...

27 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

He Deciphered the Solar System's Secrets

by Science News Staff

Today is the 425th anniversary of the birth of Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer who profoundly influenced modern science with his laws of planetary motion, published in 1609. Kepler's laws...

27 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Absent-Minded Mice Shed Light on Memory

by Science News Staff

Boston--A new breed of forgetful mice paddling in a tiny swimming pool in a lab here offers direct confirmation of the reigning theory of how we remember. By erasing the...

26 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

The One Who Caught the Wave

by Science News Staff

Today is the 135th anniversary of the birth of Emil Wiechert, a German geophysicist who helped launch the field of seismology. He developed by 1900 the Wiechert seismograph, an inverted...

26 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Who's the Smallest of Them All?

by Science News Staff

Don't worry, the quark still reigns as the universe's smallest object. Findings to appear in the journal Physical Review Letters upend recent suggestions that these subatomic particles might harbor even...

26 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

U.K. Universities: A League of Their Own

by Science News Staff

London--The British government last week released the final tally of the world's most comprehensive peer review process: a league table rating the research status of departments and institutions. This year's...

24 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Science Is Big Winner in Japan's 1997 Budget

by Science News Staff

TOKYO--Basic science is set to receive a big boost in the next Japanese budget, according to draft figures released Friday by the Ministry of Finance. The increase--a rise of 8%...

24 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Creating From Scratch an RNA-Based Fiend

by Science News Staff

Scientists have for the first time reconstituted a complex form of RNA virus from only its matching DNA template. This new approach to engineering the bunyamwera virus, which has been...

24 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Selenium's Surprising Anticancer Power

by Science News Staff

In a stunning finding, daily supplements of the trace element selenium have been found to reduce the risk of several types of cancer in patients with a history of skin...

23 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Nickel for Your Thoughts

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, a Swedish chemist born in 1722 who is best known for his discovery of nickel and his mineral classification scheme. In 1751,...

23 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Time Taps AIDS Researcher for Top Award

by Science News Staff

In an honor that has never been bestowed upon a single scientist, Time magazine has named David Ho, head of New York City's Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center (ADARC), its...

23 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Jolt of Cash Boosts CERN Collider

by Science News Staff

PARIS--Europe has put its grand high-energy physics project--the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)--on the fast track. On Friday, delegates from the 19 member countries of CERN, the European particle physics center...

23 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Clue to the Origin of Sporadic Breast Tumors

by Science News Staff

Researchers have detected genetic aberrations in healthy tissue of some breast cancer patients who do not seem to possess a genetic predisposition to the cancer. The finding, reported in the...

20 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Could DNA Vaccines Undermine Immunity?

by Science News Staff

Vaccines of live pathogens have saved countless lives, but living vaccines are not totally stripped of their ability to kill and maim: About eight vaccine-induced polio cases occur per year...

20 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Clinton Taps Transportation Chief for Top DOE Job

by Science News Staff

Washington--In a surprise move, President Bill Clinton today named outgoing Transportation Secretary Federico Peña to lead the Department of Energy (DOE) in his next Administration. Peña beat out a California...

20 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Astronomy Loses Its Most Popular Voice

by Science News Staff

Carl Sagan, the astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose books and television shows fired the imaginations of millions of people, died early this morning in Seattle, of pneumonia. Sagan, 62,...

19 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Breakthrough of the Year: New Weapons Against HIV

by Science News Staff

In recognition of stunning advances in both clinical and basic research related to AIDS, the editors of Science have chosen new weapons against HIV as the Breakthrough of the Year...

19 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Judge Finds Breast-Implant Health Evidence Beyond Pale

by Science News Staff

Heeding advice from an outside scientific panel, a federal judge in Oregon this week ruled that evidence linking silicone breast implants to immune disorders in 70 women was too weak...

19 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Arctic Tundra Leaking Greenhouse Gases

by Science News Staff

A profound change appears to be sweeping the landscape above the Arctic Circle: Northern Alaska's tundra is warming up, perhaps because of local climate change. And as it warms, it...

19 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Infectious Protein Strains No Longer Strain the Truth?

by Science News Staff

The heretical idea that prions--naked protein particles without a stitch of genetic material--can cause transmissible disorders such as mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in people has just received...

18 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Microquakes May Hint at the Big Ones

by Science News Staff

San Francisco--Swarms of barely perceptible tremors could provide the best glimpse yet into deformations in the Earth's deep crust--the root cause of earthquakes--two seismologists announced here this week at the...

18 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Russia to Aid China's Crewed Space Effort

by Science News Staff

China may soon be the third country with a crewed space program. Industry experts believe that the Chinese--thanks to new plans to collaborate with cash-strapped Russian space scientists--will be able...

18 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Beating Chlamydia at Its Own Game

by Science News Staff

Scientists from the University of Washington have unraveled the mystery of how Chlamydia bacteria bind to and infect host cells. The finding, reported in the current issue of the Journal...

18 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

The Secret Behind an Impossible Flight

by Science News Staff

The way a dragonfly hovers and zigzags in the air seems an impossible feat--at least, conventional physics has been at a loss to explain how these and many other insects...

17 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Rewriting the Book on How to Treat Alcoholics

by Science News Staff

Washington--You can toss out the window any convictions about the best form of psychotherapy to get alcoholics to quit drinking. Contrary to a leading theory, it doesn't seem to matter...

17 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Russian Weapons Labs Brace for American Invasion

by Science News Staff

WASHINGTON--A hundred U.S. scientists will travel next year to Russia's two main nuclear weapons institutes in an effort to spur collaborative research and bolster sagging morale among weapons researchers there....

17 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

This Little Piggy Organ Going to Market?

by Science News Staff

LONDON--Claims in the British media this week that the government is set to give the green light to transplantation of organs from genetically modified pigs into human patients have been...

17 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

World's Fastest Computer

by Science News Staff

WASHINGTON--Breaking the sound barrier may have been more sexy, but a computer designed by Intel Corp. has performed an equally awesome feat: It is the first to perform 1 trillion...

16 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Payback Time for Austrian Research?

by Science News Staff

BERLIN--Austria's attempts to persuade the European Union (EU) to help bankroll a major research center there could get a boost from a new analysis by an Austrian policy institute. The...

16 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

New Hot-and-Fast Planets

by Science News Staff

The planetary freak show is getting so crowded it's hard to call them freaks anymore. An analysis of three new Jupiter-sized planets in tight orbits around their suns, presented in...

16 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Room to Roam, Else Extinction

by Science News Staff

A set of studies in Tanzania has added strong support to a theory that ecologists have long believed but have had difficulty proving: that species are more likely to become...

13 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Breathing Less Easy in Arizona

by Science News Staff

Arizona's warm, dry climate has long been a magnet for people with respiratory problems. But a report in today's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) indicates that its climate is...

13 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

King of Dinosaur Skulls

by Science News Staff

Paleontologists have unearthed in Madagascar one of the most complete dinosaur skulls ever found. The discovery sheds new light on a little-known dinosaur called Majungasaurus, which lived on the island...

13 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

A Space Burst With Staying Power

by Science News Staff

Four space-based detectors have picked up what might be a statistical fluke--or a vital clue in what Bonnard Teegarden of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, calls "the...

13 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Gene Rules Fly Sex Lives

by Science News Staff

Like many men, male fruit flies have a considerable array of schemes for courting females, from tender touching to solo serenades. But in a surprising find, it appears that in...

December 1996 Archives

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