August 1998 Archives

« Previous
|
1
|
2

Previous Month Next Month

13 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Flawed Enzyme Linked to Wizened Worms

by Dan Ferber

When an aging power plant breaks down, a whole city can black out. A similar phenomenon may happen in animals: A defective enzyme in mitochondria--the cell's tiny power plants--poisons entire...

13 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Nanotubes With a Semiconducting Filling

by Meher Antia

Researchers have made miniature electrical cables with three concentric layers--a semiconductor covered with sheaths of an insulator and a metal. These nanowires, described in tomorrow's Science, could potentially be used...

13 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Neptune's Hasty Moon

by Govert Schilling

Ever since Newton, astronomers have been calculating the orbits of planets and moons and getting them exactly right. But Galatea, a small satellite of Neptune, is ahead of schedule, observers...

12 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Stuff Between Stars

by Science News Staff

At the turn of the century, astronomers wanted to know whether matter existed between the stars and, if so, whether it affected their readings of starlight. Otto Struve, a Russian-American...

12 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Battle for Control of Albanian Dig

by Richard Stone

About 2000 years ago, the Romans built a stunning theater in the coastal Albanian town of Butrint during their military conquests of the Balkans. Today the ruins are witness to...

12 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Liverworts: The Original Landed Gentry

by Christie Aschwanden

Medieval herbalists named liverworts after the plant's liver-shaped lobes, whose extracts they believed could cure jaundice and other liver problems. Although the liverwort can't claim fame as a wonder drug...

12 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Tugging Satellite Data Into Step With Global Warming

by Robert Irion

A newly unmasked error in satellite probes of temperatures in Earth's atmosphere suggests that over the past 20 years the lower atmosphere has warmed slightly--not cooled, as the data had...

11 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Mosquito Connection

by Science News Staff

This month marks the 101st anniversary of the discovery by Sir Ronald Ross that mosquitoes transmit malaria. The popular view had been that malaria was caused by bad air (mal...

11 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Coordinated Attack on Eco Threats?

by Science News Staff

BALTIMORE--At the request of the White House, federal ecologists are following the lead of climate scientists and fashioning a blueprint for working together and with academia, according to agency officials...

11 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

A Volcanic Spark for Early Life

by Science News Staff

Flashes of lightning in volcanic ash clouds may have helped set the stage for life on Earth. Volcanic plumes were ideal crucibles for sparking stable nitrogen to form reactive compounds...

11 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

SOHO Calls Home, Raising Hopes of Recovery

by Science News Staff

Ground controllers have reestablished full radio contact with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), raising hopes of bringing the $1 billion spacecraft back to life. Many had given SOHO up...

10 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

NASA Woos Caltech Astronomer for Top Science Job

by Science News Staff

NASA officials have been hunting fruitlessly for a new space science chief since spring, when Wes Huntress announced he would leave the agency this fall after a 5-year stint in...

10 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Feeling the Tiniest Stresses

by Science News Staff

An extremely sensitive microscope can measure the strain in a material over just tens of atoms. The achievement, described in the 3 August issue of Physical Review Letters, will allow...

10 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Stealth RNA Protects Retina's Rods

by Science News Staff

Scientists have engineered a genetic weapon that, in animal models, can forestall a common form of progressive blindness. The therapy uses a designer ribozyme, a short strand of RNA that...

7 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Mind of Machines

by Science News Staff

Sunday, 9 August, is the 71st birthday of computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence--the quest to develop computers that can learn, think, and perform...

7 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Buddy System Makes Complex Carbs Simple

by Science News Staff

Teamwork beats going it alone when it comes to making from scratch at least one complex carbohydrate that could be the basis for new drugs. Two bacterial enzymes tethered to...

7 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Time-Saving Memory Loss

by Science News Staff

You may think you remember every nook and cranny where you looked for those lost car keys. But a report in the current Nature suggests otherwise: The brain, it seems,...

7 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

SOHO Wakes Up Mumbling

by Science News Staff

After 6 weeks of silence, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has answered NASA controllers' pleas with brief bursts of a still-unintelligible radio signal. The sporadic reply to commands, which...

6 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Most Air Force Chimps to Stay in Research

by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

WASHINGTON, D.C.--In a move that has dismayed primatologists and animal rights activists, the U.S. Air Force announced today that it would hand over most of its chimpanzee colony to a...

6 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Resistant Weed Could Outdo Crop

by Kate O'Rourke

BALTIMORE--Weeds that acquire genes for herbicide resistance from a genetically engineered crop can reproduce just as well as nonhybrid weeds. The finding, reported here today at the Ecological Society of...

6 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Pollution Law Slackens Acid Rain

by David Malakoff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A controversial air pollution law substantially reduced acid rain in the United States in 1995, researchers reported Tuesday. The success story could spur the wider adoption of market-based pollution...

6 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Mold That Made History

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist born in 1881 who accidentally discovered the antibiotic penicillin, one of the most important medicines of the 20th century. A...

5 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

A Dog's Best Friend

by Science News Staff

Today is the 90th birthday of naturalist Miriam Rothschild, a self-trained English naturalist and the world's foremost authority on fleas. Rothschild had no formal education growing up, but learned about...

5 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Selfish Genes of Fire Ant Assassins

by Science News Staff

The idea of selfish genes, which stick around even if they do no obvious good for the individual carrying them, has some new evidence to back it up. A particularly...

5 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Surfing on a Laser's Wake

by Science News Staff

Particle accelerators are some of the biggest lab equipment around, with dimensions of kilometers. Now a group of researchers has tested a tabletop accelerator that uses powerful laser pulses to...

5 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Cocaine High Blocked by Epilepsy Drug

by Science News Staff

An epilepsy drug used in Europe eliminates key signs of cocaine addiction in baboons and rats, according to a study in this week's Synapse. If confirmed in human studies, the...

4 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Cheetahs Adapt to Cub Deaths

by Science News Staff

Endangered cheetah populations in Africa have a staggeringly high rate of infant mortality: Just 5% of cheetah cubs survive to adulthood. This has led to proposals to stop predators from...

4 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Life Breathed Into Deep-Sea Evolution

by Science News Staff

The best spot for evolving radically new marine creatures has seemed to be in shallow waters, where storms and fierce battles for resources wipe out the competition. Now two researchers...

4 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

New Dimensions Within Reach?

by Science News Staff

The front-runner for a "theory of everything," which would corral all the known forces and particles into a single equation, is a mathematical tangle of "strings" that wander through 10...

4 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Unraveling Insulin

by Science News Staff

Yesterday was the 80th birthday of Frederick Sanger, an English biochemist who was the first to take apart a protein molecule, chemically removing one amino acid at a time. Researchers...

3 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Animal Organ Transplants Get Boost in U.K.

by Science News Staff

LONDON--The transplantation of animal organs into humans has moved a step closer in Britain. On Friday, a government committee announced national guidelines intended to ensure that proposed clinical trials don't...

3 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Chewing Leaves to Fight Fleas

by Science News Staff

Wild rats may have figured out a way to "flea-bomb" their homes. The dusky-footed wood rat, which builds stick houses sometimes taller than 2 meters, likes to place nibbled leaves...

3 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

IBM Pushing Faster Chips

by Science News Staff

IBM announced today that it will soon begin producing microprocessor chips that it says could boost operating speeds by 25% and overall chip performance by more than a third. In...