July 1999 Archives

30 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Seeing the Sea Floor

by Science News Staff

Today is the 79th birthday of Marie Tharp, an oceanographic cartographer whose maps of the world's sea floors helped shape a new view of Earth--plate tectonics--in which crustal plates constantly...

30 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Antibiotics Against a Genetic Disorder?

by Maggie Villiger

Some antibiotics have more going for them than their power to kill bacteria. Mice studies published in the August Journal of Clinical Investigation show that some of these drugs may...

30 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Source of the Salt of the Sea

by Richard A. Kerr

Since the discovery of billowing black smokers on the ocean floor in the 1970s, oceanographers have assumed that these hot vents held the answer to a long-standing mystery: how to...

29 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

New Planet in Earthlike Orbit

by Govert Schilling

Astronomers announced today the discovery of a planet outside our solar system that orbits its star in just under one of our years, the most Earth-like extrasolar planet found to...

29 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Keck Gives $110 Million for Neurogenetics

by Jocelyn Kaiser

The W. M. Keck Foundation, best known for funding giant telescopes that help scientists peer into the distant universe, has decided to invest $110 million to help life on Earth....

29 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Requiem for the Mozart Effect?

by Dana Mackenzie

A popular theory that listening to Mozart will improve your reasoning skills has taken a hit this month. After trying to replicate the original research on which the theory was...

29 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Stem Cells as Potential Nerve Therapy

by Sabine Steghaus-Kovac

In the best example yet of the potential power of stem cells, a team of German and U.S. researchers has coaxed cells from mouse embryos to grow into apparently fully...

29 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Camera Fails to Snap Asteroid Flyby

by Govert Schilling

It was the closest flyby of a celestial body ever performed: At 12:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, NASA's Deep Space 1 successfully zipped past asteroid Braille at a distance of...

28 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Aboriginal Clue to Hepatitis

by Science News Staff

Today is the 74th birthday of Baruch Blumberg, an American research physician whose work has led to blood screening and a vaccine against hepatitis B. As chief of the...

28 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Glowing Sperm Sheds Light on Sex Wars

by Dana Mackenzie

Female fruit flies have a busy sex life. They mate once every couple of days, and store male sperm in their reproductive tract for up to a week. For males,...

28 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Merck Reenters AIDS Vaccine Field

by Jon Cohen

Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical powerhouse that dropped out of the HIV vaccine field in the early 1990s, is aggressively reentering the arena. The company has plans to launch tests...

27 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

The Color of Blood

by Science News Staff

The scientist who discovered the chemical structure of hemin, the iron-laden compound in red blood cells that gives blood its color, was born on this day in 1881. Hans Fischer...

27 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Uranus Breaks Record With Two New Moons

by Govert Schilling

Move over, Saturn. Uranus is now the planet with the largest number of moons. An international team of astronomers led by JJ Kavelaars of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, say...

27 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

AIDS Drug Thwarts Immune System

by Kate O'Rourke

A potential AIDS drug called azodicarbonamide not only suppresses HIV but also the human immune system, scientists report in the August issue of Nature Medicine. Although some scientists think the...

26 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

New England Journal Editor Forced Out

by Eliot Marshall

Jerome Kassirer, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), has been asked to step down following a management dispute with the journal's owner, the Massachusetts Medical Society. According...

26 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Watching the Brain Take a Sniff

by Marcia Barinaga

A whiff of perfume or the smell of wood smoke can dredge up a host of memories. But to the brain, smells are simply mixtures of chemicals detected in the...

26 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

She Began a Baby Boom

by Science News Staff

ScienceNOW wishes a happy 21st birthday to the first test tube baby, Joy Louise Brown, who was born in England on 25 July 1978. Brown got her start thanks to...

23 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Mirror of Chemistry

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Vladimir Prelog, a pioneer in stereochemistry, the field that studies how the chemical properties of molecules are affected by the three-dimensional arrangements of their atoms....

23 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Biomedical Research Funding: Joy on Hold

by Eliot Marshall

This week, U.S. biomedical researchers briefly caught sight of a big increase in federal funding in 2000--potentially the second windfall in 2 years--until it disappeared in the haze of party...

23 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Chandra Finds its Place in the Sky

by Ann Finkbeiner

American x-ray astronomers finally have a telescope of their own. This morning, the Space Shuttle Columbia safely deployed the $2.8 billion Chandra X-ray Observatory into the orbit from which it...

23 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Leakey Takes Top Kenyan Post

by Gretchen Vogel

In a surprising move, anthropologist Richard Leakey has left his current post as director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS), to become head of the civil service, the highest nonpolitical...

22 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

He Broke the Antibiotic Mold

by Science News Staff

The man who coined the term "antibiotics" and pioneered their development was born on this day in 1888. While studying how plant and animal remains decompose in soil, microbiologist Selman...

22 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

NIH Helps Patch Up Synchrotrons

by Robert F. Service

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), flush with cash thanks to strong congressional support for biomedicine in recent years, is getting into the synchrotron construction business. Yesterday, NIH officials announced...

22 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

The Brain: Use It or Lose It

by Constance Holden

Readers of ScienceNOW will be gratified to learn of new evidence that intellectual activity helps stave off senility. The latest is from a brain scan study of older adults, showing...

22 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Climate Rides FM Waves

by Richard A. Kerr

According to textbooks, many past climate changes, including the ice ages, closely followed the rhythmic nodding and wobbling of Earth's spin axis and the periodic stretching of its orbit. The...

21 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

And Now, the Asteroid Forecast ...

by Govert Schilling

Astronomers have devised a scale to rate the danger posed by asteroids headed for Earth, comparable to the Richter scale of earthquake fame. The so-called Torino scale, which ranges from...

21 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

His Discoveries Made a Splash

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Thomas Charles Hope, a Scottish chemist born in 1766. Although he considered himself a teacher, Hope is remembered for two original contributions to chemistry. Hope...

21 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Genes Make Chimps Glad or Sad

by Constance Holden

Happiness in chimps, as in humans, is strongly influenced by their genetic makeup, according to researchers at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Scientists say such findings demonstrate the usefulness of...

21 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

X-Ray Crystallography Without Crystals

by Robert F. Service

X-ray crystallography, a technique that can produce images of molecules with exquisite detail, has one drawback: It works best on crystals, in which many copies of a molecule are lined...

20 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Surveyor of the Atomic Landscape

by Science News Staff

Today is the 52nd birthday of Gerd Binnig, a German physicist who, together with Heinrich Rohrer, invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), an instrument used to create atomic-level images of...

20 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

New Collider Won't Destroy Earth, Lab Says

by David Malakoff

Physicists are trying to put to rest worries that a new particle collider will destroy the Earth. Responding to recent media reports, the head of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in...

20 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Turning a Rice Virus Against Itself

by Gretchen Vogel

The rice yellow mottle virus (RYMV), endemic in Africa, can destroy just about every plant in a field. Although native African rice strains are resistant to the virus, it can...

20 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

DOE Reviews "Cold Fusion" Grant

by David Malakoff

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is reconsidering a grant that critics say will fund "cold fusion" experiments. DOE officials this week announced that a special review panel will take...

19 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Warm Oceans Predict Rift Valley Epidemics

by Ayala Ochert

Ocean temperatures off Tahiti and Madagascar can predict outbreaks of disease in Kenya, according to a study in the current issue of Science (16 July, p. 397). The researchers found...

19 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

A Bloody Measure

by Science News Staff

In search of tiny amounts of antibodies, medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow developed a technique that came up very big for biomedical researchers. Today is the 78th birthday of the Nobel...

19 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Anti-Immune Trick Unveiled in Salmonella

by Evelyn Strauss

Researchers may have found the reason why patients with a systemic Salmonella infection, such as typhoid fever, are slow to quell the infection and get very sick. In the current...

16 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

"Gutsy" Endorsement for Stem Cell Research

by Eliot Marshall

Research using cells from human embryos received an important seal of approval this week. In a decision that Stanford biologist Paul Berg calls "gutsy," the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC)...

16 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

U.S. Science Advocate Brown Dies

by David Malakoff

Scientists have lost one of their leading advocates in Congress. Representative George E. Brown Jr. (D-CA), the oldest member of the House of Representatives and a leader of the House...

16 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Mission to Mir Under Way

by Andrey Allakhverdov and Elena Savelieva

A cargo ship bound for the Russian space station Mir blasted off from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 16.37 Greenwich Mean Time today. The launch, which came only after emergency...

16 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Spying on a Photon Without Harming It

by Andrew Watson

In this week's Nature, a team of physicists reports a groundbreaking quantum manipulation experiment: They have managed to detect a single photon repeatedly without destroying it. The experiment is a...

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