March 2000 Archives

31 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Three Knockout Mice, See How They Cower

by Mary Beckman

The farmer's wife wouldn't have to chase these mice. Genetically engineered mice that lack a gene for registering stress are even more anxious than their normal cousins, who are not...

31 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

AIDS Research Head to Retire

by Jon Cohen

The widely respected, hyperkinetic overseer of the $2 billion AIDS research program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced his retirement yesterday. Neal Nathanson said his last day will...

31 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Truth Is Beauty, Strange, Charm ...

by Charles Seife

Most poets don't need to worry about radiation hazards, but Bridget Meeds wears a dosimeter when she works. Meeds is the new poet-in-residence at Cornell University's Wilson Lab, a high-energy...

31 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Chipping Away at the Causes of Aging

by Jean Marx

Wrinkles, thinning hair, weak bones and muscles--the physical degeneration of aging is well known. But it's still a mystery why the body breaks down as it gets older. Now, using...

30 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Organic Crystals Coaxed to Conduct Quickly

by Adrian Cho

MINNEAPOLIS--A new organic crystal has a surprising ability to perform a weird quantum mechanical trick, researchers reported on 22 March at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. The...

30 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Quiet Spot Marks Hyperactive Brain

by Michael Hagmann

From supercharged kindergartners to unfocused teenagers, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most controversial diagnoses of a childhood illness. Although some people don't think that ADHD is based...

30 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Ecologists Drown During Research Trip

by David Malakoff

A spring break research trip has ended in disaster, leaving the tight-knit world of professional ecologists mourning the loss of five of its own. The scientists--two Americans from the University...

30 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

War in Congo Threatens Great Apes

by Gretchen Vogel

Great apes are being hit hard in the war that has gripped the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the past 18 months. The front lines cut through the heart...

29 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

NASA Rethinking Mars Plans

by Andrew Lawler

NASA is reorganizing its Mars exploration effort in the wake of a critical report released Tuesday. The report identifies some of the mistakes that led to last year's loss of...

29 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

New Source for Cancer Drug

by Robert F. Service

SAN FRANCISCO--Taxol is a potent and popular cancer drug, but it is harvested from the needles of an endangered tree, and the demand for the drug could outpace the trees'...

29 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Smallest Distant Planets Yet Detected

by Charles Seife

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The planet hunters are at it again, and this time, they've bagged two Saturn-sized worlds. The two planets orbiting distant stars are the smallest extrasolar planets yet found, and...

29 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Low Levels of HIV Reduce Transmission

by Gretchen Vogel

People infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are much less likely to pass their infection on to a sex partner if they carry a low number of viral...

28 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Tracking the Elusive Sound Channel

by Marcia Barinaga

When you hear a clap of thunder or a hushed whisper, sound waves are tousling microscopic hairs inside the ear, setting off nerve impulses that crackle to the brain. Neuroscientists...

28 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Galaxies and Black Holes Grow Up Together

by Alexander Hellemans

The older a galaxy, the heavier the black hole at its center, according to a study slated for publication in the 1 April Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

28 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Gene Weakens Resistance to Cancer Bug

by Michael Hagmann

The notorious stomach bug Helicobacter pylori has been implicated in ailments such as chronic gastritis, peptic ulcers, and stomach cancer. Now researchers have uncovered a genetic factor that increases the...

28 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Neandertal DNA Spells Separate Origins

by Constance Holden

The second mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis from a Neandertal--and the first to be done on clearly dated remains--will be disappointing news for those who like the idea of having Neandertals...

27 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Physicists Unveil Schroedinger's SQUID

by Adrian Cho

MINNEAPOLIS--It doesn't purr, but a tiny superconducting ring is the closest thing yet to Erwin Schroedinger's famous dead-and-alive cat. At last week's meeting of the American Physical Society in Minneapolis,...

27 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Drug-Resistant TB on the Rise

by Erik Stokstad

Once thought easy prey for antibiotics, tuberculosis fought back in the 1980s and now kills more than 2 million people a year--second only to HIV among infectious diseases. Especially frightening...

27 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

France Reshuffles Science Ministry

by Michael Balter

PARIS--France's controversial minister of research and education was sacked this week after a tumultuous 3-year tenure. Geochemist Claude Allègre invoked strong reaction from scientists and a series of protests and...

27 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Too Stressed to Remember

by Liese Greensfelder

An anxious witness takes the stand and then can't remember crucial details of her story. Faked or forgotten? A new study that teases apart the effects of a stress hormone...

24 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

South Pole Doctor Gets Book Deal

by Erik Stokstad

Jerri Nielsen, the physician who last year discovered she had breast cancer while overwintering at the South Pole with a team from the National Science Foundation, is preparing to break...

24 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Star-Studded Superconductors

by Adrian Cho

MINNEAPOLIS--Scientists studying high-temperature superconductors are seeing stars. A painstaking scanning technique reveals delicate star-shaped patterns on the materials that may help physicists understand how superconductors whisk electricity along without any...

24 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Did Early Hominids Walk on Their Knuckles?

by Erik Stokstad

Humans evolved from an ancestor that walked on its knuckles, like several modern-day apes, according to a new analysis of casts of 3-million- to 4-million-year-old hominid bones. "For the first...

24 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

'Earthshake' Damages Solar Satellite

by Andrew Lawler

A NASA mission to study solar flares has suffered a rough ride even before it left the ground. On Tuesday a vibration test of the High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager...

24 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Satellite to Be Smashed Into Pacific

by Laura Helmuth

WASHINGTON, D.C.--NASA announced today it will euthanize an ailing but successful satellite. A gyroscope failure late last year upped the odds that the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) could spin...

23 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Physicist Gets Religion Award

by Constance Holden

The John Templeton Foundation has chosen another scientist for its lucrative annual Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. This year's award will go to British physicist Freeman Dyson. The prize,...

23 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Flipping Bits With Spinning Electrons

by Adrian Cho

MINNEAPOLIS--Researchers have found a new way to flip the direction of minuscule magnets by running electrical currents through them. The technique, reported here Tuesday at the March meeting of the...

23 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

'Left-Handed' Material Puts Twist on Physics

by Adrian Cho

MINNEAPOLIS--Physicists are marveling over a small, fairly simple contraption of wires and copper rings that can reverse the magnetic field in microwaves, seemingly thumbing its nose at a venerated standard...

23 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Fruit Fly Genome Yields Disease Genes

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Fruit flies are more like humans than they look. That's one of the main conclusions of the mammoth effort to sequence Drosophila's entire genome, which was completed last month (ScienceNOW,...

23 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Dusted Data Show a Warming World

by Richard A. Kerr

Rummaging through piles of neglected data, physical oceanographers have turned up millions of old, deep-ocean temperature measurements that confirm suspicions that Earth is heating up as a result of greenhouse...

22 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

U.S. and India Strengthen Science Ties

by Pallava Bagla

Senior science policy officials from India and the United States have kicked off an effort to promote cooperation between the two countries. Yesterday, during President Clinton's visit to India, they...

22 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Million-Dollar Assault on Goldbach

by Charles Seife

It's about as simple as math problems come, but the Goldbach Conjecture has stumped mathematicians for more than 250 years. And now, thanks to two publishing companies, there's a $1...

22 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Buckyballs Deliver Gas From Outer Space

by Mark Sincell

The meteorite that some suspect doomed the dinosaurs also carried with it extraterrestrial gases trapped in tiny carbon cages called buckyballs, scientists report in the 28 March Proceedings of the...

22 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

A Fly Model for Parkinson's Disease

by Gretchen Vogel

Researchers have genetically engineered strains of fruit flies to mimic many of the same symptoms as humans with Parkinson's disease. Researchers hope the insects, which suffer the premature death of...

21 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Further Food Fights

by Martin Enserink

WASHINGTON, D.C.--In a new sign that the battle over biotech food is heating up in the United States, a coalition of 54 consumer, farming, and environmental organizations today petitioned the...

21 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Cosmic Power Producers

by Charles Seife

Never say that cosmologists are impractical. Two have invented a scheme for making the most efficient engine yet envisioned--a black hole engine. Black holes, which are collapsed stars, qualify as...

21 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Diagnosing Cancer Made Easy

by Anna Davison

Detecting some tumors may become a lot simpler and less invasive in the future, according to a study published in the 17 March issue of Science. Researchers have shown how...

21 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Sweet Victory for Taste Researchers

by Marcia Barinaga

Researchers have identified a huge family of receptors that help us taste bitter compounds. The finding, published in the 17 March Cell, solves a major riddle in taste research and...

20 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Where the Solar Wind Hits the Wall

by Alexander Hellemans

Every so often, the stream of particles coming from the sun knocks out a satellite or disrupts power grids on Earth. But that's nothing compared to the collisions in interstellar...

20 March 2000 | ScienceNOW

Tiny Grains May Boost Room for Data Storage

by Robert F. Service

IBM researchers have created a magnetic film containing tiny magnetic particles--each just 4 nanometers across--that could be the basis of a new generation of hard disk drives. The films may...

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