March 1999 Archives

17 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Music as Muscle-Builder for the Brain

by Constance Holden

Scientists have found new evidence for the so-called "Mozart effect"--the phenomenon that music can enhance some mathematical abilities. The results appear in the current issue of Neurological Research. In earlier...

16 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

The Path of Life

by Science News Staff

A watershed in biochemistry--Melvin Calvin's scientific paper detailing the complete biochemical pathway through which plants convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into carbohydrates--was published 37 years ago, in the 16...

16 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Cresson Resigns After Damning Fraud Report

by Robert Koenig

The European Union's embattled research commissioner, Edith Cresson, submitted her resignation yesterday along with the other 19 EU commissioners in the wake of a report by a European Parliament investigative...

16 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

A Soothing Herpes Infection

by Dana Mackenzie

The virus that causes herpes may someday bring relief, rather than misery. In the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, biologists show that the herpes virus can shuttle...

15 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

A Genius, Relatively Speaking

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of legendary physicist Albert Einstein, born in Germany in 1879. Einstein took science by storm with his special and general theories of relativity, which dethroned Isaac...

15 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

An Anticancer Partner for Angiostatin?

by Marcia Barinaga

Scientists have discovered how a protein called angiostatin may put the brakes on tumor growth in mice. Their findings, published in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could...

15 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Coming Next Year: Our Genetic Code

by Elizabeth Pennisi

By the ides of March 2000, researchers should have almost the entire human genome in their grasp. Earlier today, the major backers of the Human Genome Project, an international effort...

12 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Ground Zero of a Cosmic Explosion

by Diana Steele

Astronomers now have their closest look yet at a distant galaxy that spawned a gamma ray burst--a titanic explosion in the distant universe. This photograph, taken by the Hubble Space...

12 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Firming Up a Protein Grip

by Dan Ferber

As molecular workers of the cell, proteins often do business with a handshake, temporarily grasping other molecules to pass on signals that order cells to grow or multiply. Now researchers...

12 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Memory in the Motor Cortex

by Ingrid Wickelgren

The motor cortex--a strip of tissue on the top of the brain that tells our muscles what to do--now appears to do far more than simply orchestrate movements. In today's...

11 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Tuning In to a Distant Planet

by Science News Staff

The French astronomer who co-discovered the planet Neptune, Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, was born on this day in 1811. Based on hints that Uranus veered slightly from the orbit predicted...

11 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

The Brain Impenetrable

by Michael Hagmann

The blood-brain barrier, which controls chemical traffic to and from the brain, may be even more complex than previously thought. Some compounds that appear to penetrate the entire brain, as...

11 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Atom Lasers Get More Laserlike

by David Voss

An "atom laser" could make measurements of length and time with unprecedented accuracy or even build microscopic structures atom by atom. But the few atom lasers built so far emit...

10 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

New U.K. Budget Boosts Science

by Daniel Clery

CAMBRIDGE--Massive new tax breaks for U.K. industrial research and several goodies for academic researchers are part of a new budget announced yesterday by the Blair government. "Scientific innovation is a...

10 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Nabel to Head AIDS Vaccine Institute

by David Malakoff

A long-leaderless AIDS vaccine research institute has finally found a director. After an 18-month search, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will name University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, molecular biologist...

10 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Deep-Sea Shrimp Blinded by Science

by Robert Irion

When '80s pop star Thomas Dolby sang "She blinded me with science," little did he know that his bouncy lyric prophesied the fate of shrimp deep in the Atlantic. Researchers...

9 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Conviction in Tainted Blood Trial

by Michael Balter

PARIS--The trial of three former French ministers in France's long-running HIV blood scandal came to a close today, with one conviction and two acquittals. Although former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius...

9 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Gene Implicated in Prostate Cancer

by Adrian Cho

A gene linked to breast cancer may spur the growth of advanced prostate cancer, which kills some 44,000 American men each year. The finding, from a study of tumors transplanted...

9 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

A Sinuous Solar Storm Warning

by Mark Sincell

Eruptions on the sun can whip up magnetic storms on Earth, frying communications satellites and jamming aircraft radar. The solar outbursts that cause Earth's magnetic field to convulse in these...

8 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Mark His Words

by Science News Staff

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -HOWARD AIKEN Tomorrow would have been the 99th birthday...

8 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

The WIRE Is Dead

by David Malakoff

Astronomers have given up hope of getting any science out of the Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) spacecraft. NASA officials announced today that the $54 million orbiting telescope, launched just 4...

8 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Payoff Seen From Keys Fishing Ban

by David Malakoff

A controversial attempt to rejuvenate fisheries in the Florida Keys appears to be paying off. In 1997, over the strong objections of some anglers, officials at the Florida Keys Marine...

5 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Physics Prize Falls Foul of Middle East Politics

by Michael Balter

PARIS--A bitter dispute has broken out among some of France's leading physicists over a decision by the French Physical Society (SFP) to block the award of a prize named after...

5 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

How the Nose Knows

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Neurobiologists have sniffed out how the nose uses relatively few kinds of molecular sensors to discriminate among thousands of odors. As reported in today's Cell, different smells activate unique suites...

5 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Greenland's Shrinking Glaciers

by Robert Irion

Another effect of climate change has surfaced, this time on Greenland. A NASA team reports today in Science that the edges of the Northern Hemisphere's biggest ice cap shrank markedly...

4 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Hair Club for Mice?

by Gretchen Vogel

Most laboratory mice don't live long enough to go bald or grey, but a strain of animals missing an enzyme linked to cellular aging look like they could use a...

4 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

New Drug Target for Type 2 Diabetes

by Dan Ferber

For the 15.7 million Americans with type 2 diabetes, good health means daily vigilance. To head off the eye, kidney, and heart damage the disease can cause, sufferers must follow...

4 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Surprising Asymmetry Seen in Kaon Decays

by James Glanz

CHICAGO--Once again, nature is teasing particle physicists. The Standard Model of subatomic particles, a body of theory that has survived several close shaves over the past few years, suggests that...

4 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Atoms on a Wire

by Alexander Hellemans

Physicists have coaxed ultracold atoms to migrate along the outside of a wire by sending a current through it, opening a new way to move such atoms around. The technique,...

3 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Proving Copernicus Right

by Science News Staff

The name of 16th century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus became a household world because he proposed that the Earth revolves around the sun. But the man who finally gathered scientific...

3 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Moonlighting by Kepler

by Dana Mackenzie

One day in the early 17th century, an Austrian nobleman named Hans Hannibal Huetter von Huetterhofen stopped by a local astrologer's office to get his horoscope cast. The event would...

3 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Splitting Hairs to Spot Breast Cancer

by Menno Schilthuizen

High-power x-rays can diagnose breast cancer from a single hair, according to a report in tomorrow's Nature. Although the technique is simpler to interpret--and potentially more reliable--than a mammogram, it...

2 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Liposomes for a Lively Liver

by Mutsumi Stone

When your liver shuts down it means lights out--you can't live without it. Now, scientists report in the February issue of Nature Medicine that they have successfully tested in rats...

2 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Rat Race May Buff up Brains

by Michael Hagmann

Long workouts or tricky memory tasks can boost the number of brain cells in adult rodents, according to two studies in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience. But it's not...

2 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Reinforcing Rice

by Kathleen Wong

Scientists have tripled the iron content of rice by inserting a soybean gene into the plant's DNA. The achievement, reported in the March issue of Nature Biotechnology, could help alleviate...

1 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Revealing Our Genetic Heritage

by Science News Staff

On 28 February in 1865, Austrian monk Gregor Johann Mendel presented seminal results of his plant-breeding experiments at a meeting of the National Sciences Society in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Although Mendel's...

1 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

DESY Mourns Its Leader

by Alexander Hellemans

A tragic accident has claimed the life of Bjorn Wiik, director of Germany's DESY particle physics laboratory in Hamburg. "We have lost an important leader in the field of high-energy...

1 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Viral Stowaway

by Elizabeth Pennisi

A virtually intact retrovirus has been found trapped in the human genome. The virus sports a full complement of genes, but a key mutation probably prevents it from infecting the...

1 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

India Raises Budget to Battle Sanctions

by Pallava Bagla

NEW DELHI--Indian researchers are feeling buoyed by a new budget unveiled on 27 February that hands science its largest increase of the decade. The 20% hike is seen as a...

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