October 1998 Archives

30 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

California, Ivy Leagues are Tops in Physical Sciences

by Science News Staff

East and west coast universities captured the top slots for "highest impact" research in the physical sciences, according to rankings in the November/December issue of ScienceWatch. The Institute for Scientific...

30 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Elephant-Nosed Fish Plays the Electric Organ

by David Kestenbaum

Most animals rely on two eyes for accurate depth perception. Not the African elephant-nosed fish, which uses electrical pulses to navigate at night. Scientists report in this week's Nature that...

30 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Fly Gene Stretches Life-Span

by Elizabeth Pennisi

According to the Bible, Methuselah lived 969 years. Now, he has another claim on immortality: Geneticists have named a newly discovered fruit fly gene in his honor. The reason, reported...

29 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Neurons Arise in Adult Brains

by Marcia Barinaga

Researchers have shown for the first time that new neurons can form in one part of adult human brains. The finding, reported in the November issue of the journal Nature...

29 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

New Carbon Shines Bright

by Alexander Hellemans

Scientists have created a sparkling form of carbon that can scatter light like opal. The relatively simple technique for making the carbon, described in tomorrow's Science, may provide an easier...

29 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Hubble Loses Another Gyro

by David Malakoff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The failure of a gyroscope aboard the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope has astronomers worried about the instrument's future. A NASA official told a scientific advisory panel here today that...

28 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Japanese Universities Urged to Get Tough

by Dennis Normile

TOKYO--Japan practically invented quality control in product manufacturing. But life is different in academia. Once past the notoriously competitive entrance exam, a university student faces an easy ride: There is...

28 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Big Quakes Trigger Touchy Volcanoes

by Robert Irion

In an explosive reaction, a large earthquake can set off a nearby volcano that is on the verge of erupting, geophysicists have found. An analysis of quakes and eruptions during...

28 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

HIV Rebounds From Low-Dose Triple Therapy

by Kevin Boyd

Simplified drug treatments will not always keep HIV in check, doctors report in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine. The study shows that cutting down from three drugs to only...

27 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

DNA Strain Analysis Debuts in Murder Trial

by Gretchen Vogel

A Louisiana doctor was found guilty Friday of attempted murder for injecting a former lover with HIV-infected blood in the first criminal case in the United States that used a...

27 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

U.K. Life Sciences Get Big Boost

by Nigel Williams

Life sciences are the big winner as the British government announced this week how it would divvy up a $1.1 billion boost for science over the next 3 years. The...

27 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Terminator Seeds Sow Discord

by Robert F. Service

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A battle is brewing over a new plant technology that allows companies to ensure that genetically modified plants produce sterile seeds--a feat that will keep farmers coming back for...

26 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

A Quick Twist in the Field

by Science News Staff

Yesterday was the birthday of Motonori Matuyama, a Japanese geophysicist born in 1884 who discovered that Earth's magnetic poles have flip-flopped throughout history. Matuyama studied traces of Earth's ancient magnetic...

26 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Getting to the Roots of Flying Famine

by Dan Ferber

Huge swarms of desert locusts have devastated crops in Africa, Asia, and Europe since biblical times, but no mortals have been able to predict when they will strike. Now a...

26 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Have a Heart Attack and Call Me in the Morning?

by Kevin Boyd

An intentional heart attack may cure some congenital heart defects, says a report in tomorrow's Circulation. In patients with a specific inherited heart problem, doctors induced a small heart attack...

23 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Skinny on Diabetes

by Trisha Gura

Fat-free may be all the rage in packaged foods, but mice genetically engineered to lack fat cells get diabetes with symptoms even more severe than those of obese mice. The...

23 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

A Meteoric Career

by Science News Staff

Ernst Öpik, an Estonian astronomer whose wide-ranging work on meteors led to the development of heat shields for spacecraft, was born on this day in 1893. Öpik studied the erosion...

23 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Diversified Science on New Panel's Agenda

by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

WASHINGTON, D.C.--In the latest effort to boost the numbers of underrepresented populations in science, President Clinton signed a bill last week that calls for a new commission that will recommend...

22 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Cheap MRI Port-a-Scanners?

by David Kestenbaum

A hospital magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) room is no place for credit cards. The MRI magnets used to paint precision pictures of your innards are strong enough to yank a...

22 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Computer to Pinpoint Distant Galaxies

by Govert Schilling

European radio astronomers have switched on a new supercomputer that will provide some of the sharpest views of the universe ever obtained. Today, researchers at the Joint Institute for Very...

22 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Chlamydia's Secrets Laid Bare

by Christie Aschwanden

Scientists have sequenced the entire genome of Chlamydia trachomatis, the enigmatic bacterium that's the leading cause of venereal disease in the United States. The work, described in tomorrow's Science, offers...

22 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Flying Aces of the Carboniferous

by Gretchen Vogel

To catch prey like mosquitoes and houseflies, dragonflies zoom and hover with extremely efficient, highly responsive wings--a feature many aerospace engineers would like to imitate. But nature had quite a...

21 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

And There Was Light

by Science News Staff

Thomas Edison unveiled the first incandescent light bulb, which burned for 40 hours, on this day in 1879. Although the idea for converting electricity into light was first investigated in...

21 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Slime Thrusters Revealed?

by Dana Mackenzie

A trail of slime may have helped scientists solve the century-old mystery of how some bacteria travel: by jet propulsion. According to a report in this week's issue of Current...

21 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Senate Confirms Henney as FDA's New Chief

by Eliot Marshall

WASHINGTON, D.C.--After blocking the nomination of oncologist Jane Henney to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for several weeks, Republican Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) relented yesterday, and the Senate...

21 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Durable Food Webs, by Computer

by Dan Ferber

Food webs are woven from many plant and animal species that interact in fantastically complex ways. The intricacies of these interactions have eluded attempts to construct realistic computer models of...

20 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Ocean Magnate

by Science News Staff

Yesterday was the 81st birthday of Walter Munk, a geophysicist whose work has led to a better understanding of ocean currents, circulation, and tides. During World War II, Munk and...

20 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Time's Tiny Arrow Revealed

by David Kestenbaum

In the everyday world, time marches forward. A shattered glass, for example, won't fly up from the floor and unbreak itself. But in the simple world of subatomic particles, most...

20 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Germany's New Science Minister Steps Out of Shadow

by Robert Koenig

BONN--The newly elected ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens yesterday announced that Edelgard Bulmahn will become research and education minister when the new government assumes control on 27 October....

19 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Artificial Glaciers to Help Farmers

by Pallava Bagla

Glacier melt is the most plentiful source of water for the peasants of Ladakh, who eke out a living in a high desert region of the Indian Himalayas. But it's...

19 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Bats Push the Limits of Sonar

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Researchers have long known that most bats use the echoes from high-pitched sounds they emit to pinpoint moths and other objects. But a report in the 13 October Proceedings of...

19 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

1999 NIH Budget to Soar

by David Malakoff and Eliot Marshall

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Biomedical researchers had to wait a long time to learn the new budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)--but nobody's complaining. Tomorrow Congress is expected to begin voting...

16 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Smell of a Hard Shower

by Science News Staff

Sunday is the birthday of Christian Schoenbein, a German chemist born in 1799 who named ozone and invented the first synthetic explosive. Schoenbein's work on ozone was considered a classic...

16 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

When the North Froze Over

by Meher Antia

About 3 million years ago, vast tracts of land in the Northern Hemisphere frosted over with huge sheets of ice. A report in today's issue of Science offers a new...

16 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Spotting Mines With Dolphin Sonar

by David Kestenbaum

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA--Dolphins can easily locate a meal of razor fish or eels hiding beneath the ocean floor by emitting chatterlike sonar clicks and listening to the echoes. Now researchers have...

15 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Scientists Find Cash Flow

by Dana Mackenzie

While financial pundits fear that the global economy is headed down the drain, a team of physicists and economists has found new evidence that the world economy behaves like a...

15 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Flexible Funds for Alzheimer's

by Christie Aschwanden

The Alzheimer's Association today presented the largest single research award it has ever given to a husband and wife team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia....

15 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Otter Deaths Bode Ill for Ecosystem

by Jocelyn Kaiser

Sea otters off the Alaskan coast play a pivotal role in marine ecosystems: By dining on sea urchins, the animals help preserve kelp forests that feed a range of species,...

15 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Vast Carbon Soaked Up by North America?

by Jocelyn Kaiser

North America may sop up a whopping 1.7 petagrams of carbon a year--enough to suck up all the carbon discharged annually by fossil fuel burning in Canada and the United...

14 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Silence Deafened Civil War Generals

by David Kestenbaum

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA--Bad acoustics may have shaped the outcome of key battles during the U.S. Civil War, according to research presented today at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America....

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