May 2000 Archives

31 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Surf's Up on the Sun

by Alexander Hellemans

The surface of the sun is roiled by sunspots and massive flares, but astronomers were surprised to see the latest anomaly: Large waves, probably 100 meters high, travel along the...

31 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Grizzlies: Shed and Be Counted

by Jocelyn Kaiser

DNA samples taken from grizzly bear hair may help resolve a bitter dispute over the size of the bear population in and around Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park. Last month, federal...

31 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Furtive Glances Trigger Radioactive Decay

by Charles Seife

Common sense says you can't keep an atom's nucleus from decaying simply by looking at it. Quantum mechanics says you can. Now two Israeli physicists have come up with a...

30 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Women's Health Getting NIH Attention

by Laura Helmuth

Over the past decade, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has sharply increased its focus on women's health issues. The General Accounting Office (GAO) concludes that record numbers of women...

30 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Physics Bumps Up Against the Unsolvable

by Barry Cipra

Physicists have been searching for decades for a simple, mathematical solution to a model of phase transitions. Such transitions occur, for instance, when ice melts or cooling iron becomes magnetic....

30 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Census to Tally Marine Life

by David Malakoff

An ambitious plan to census all the critters in the world's oceans is proceeding swimmingly, thanks to an award announced last week. The $3.7 million, distributed among eight research teams,...

30 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Protecting the World From Bad Astronomy

by Adrian Cho

From the ceiling of New York City's Grand Central Station to backsides of disposable diapers, images of stars and other heavenly objects surround us. Unfortunately, popular depictions of the cosmos...

26 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Penn, Feds Revise Gene Therapy Plans

by Eliot Marshall

In the 8 months since a teenager died in a gene therapy experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, clinical researchers have been on tenterhooks to learn the consequences for Penn--and...

26 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

A Big Week for Sea Life

by David Malakoff

A wave of good news lifted marine conservation and research this week. President Clinton today ordered federal agencies to develop a new network of marine reserves along U.S. coasts. The...

26 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

A Refuge for Life on Snowball Earth

by Richard A. Kerr

Although it sounds far-fetched, a small group of geoscientists has revived the hypothesis that Earth froze from pole to pole some 600 million years ago. Other researchers objected that 10...

26 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

In the Jungle, the Clumpy Jungle

by Menno Schilthuizen

Nineteenth century naturalist and adventurer Alfred Russel Wallace noted how hard it is to find two trees of the same species in a tropical rainforest. Ever since, conventional wisdom among...

25 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Astronomers Compose "To Do" List

by Andrew Lawler

Astronomy is expensive and high-tech. And so to prioritize which big-ticket tools should be funded in the next decade, astronomers have come up with a wish list. The National Research...

25 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Genes That Let TB Linger

by Ingrid Wickelgren

Even when it's not deadly, tuberculosis is persistent, and that makes the respiratory disease difficult to wipe out. Now, two groups of researchers have identified genes that may help TB...

25 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Nuclear Blasts Track Earth's Spinning Core

by Alexander Hellemans

One of geology's deepest mysteries, and the source of ongoing debate, is whether the solid core of the Earth rotates. Now, a new analysis of nuclear explosions from the 1970s...

24 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Radical Steps Urged for Vaccine Development

by Martin Enserink

BETHESDA, MARYLAND--It's time for bold steps to boost development of vaccines for the world's main killers--AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis--according to a range of experts gathered here 22 to 23 May....

24 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Gutsy Movies Recorded Down the Hatch

by Dana Mackenzie

Doctors today announced the successful testing of the first camera in a pill. The minicam, which fits into a capsule about twice the size of a peanut, can record up...

24 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Is That Your Final Equation?

by Science News Staff

Math's "most wanted" problems now have prices on their heads. In Paris this week, mathematicians unveiled a list of seven of the world's most intractable math problems--and announced a prize...

23 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Refinishing Damaged Spinal Nerves

by Gretchen Vogel

Stem cells continue to reveal new tricks. Researchers now report that they have coaxed these multitalented cells to repair a certain type of nerve damage in rats. If the technique...

23 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Crunch Your Numbers for Free

by Mitch Leslie

Practically every scientist uses statistics--from pharmacologists employing regression to understand the relation between the dose of a drug and its effects in the body, to agronomists using analysis of variance...

23 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Rat Race for Next Mammalian Genome

by Elizabeth Pennisi

The rat will be the next target for publicly funded gene sequencing efforts in the United States, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) told his...

22 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Three Nations Launch Air Pollution Study

by Michael Baker

SEOUL--Pollution from China's booming industrial northeast has long rained down on its richer neighbors, South Korea and Japan, damaging ecosystems and degrading public health. Now scientists from all three countries...

22 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Ulcer Bug Might Be Newcomer

by Ayala Ochert

Life for early humans must have been stressful, between all that foraging for food and seeking safe shelter. But a new study suggests they probably didn't suffer from ulcers. The...

22 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Electromagnetic Waves May Cut Turbulence

by Mark Sincell

Turbulence is expensive. By some estimates, overcoming the swirling drag that slows down submarines, boats, and airplanes costs billions of dollars a year. Now researchers have proposed a method that...

19 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Royal Technophobia

by Michael Hagmann

The scientific establishment got a taste of the royal whip Wednesday as Britain's Prince Charles decried the dominance of soulless science in today's world. We have lost a "sense of...

19 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Virus Found in Schizophrenic's Brain

by Michael Hagmann

Scientists have long suspected that an enigmatic pathogen called the Borna virus plays a role in some neuropsychiatric disorders. Now, they have for the first time isolated the virus from...

19 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Breast Cancer Deaths Plummeting

by Laura Helmuth

The number of deaths due to breast cancer has dropped steeply since the 1980s, researchers report in the 20 May issue of The Lancet. U.S. women under 69 are 25%...

19 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Biologists Ante Up for Genome Jackpot

by Elizabeth Pennisi

COLD SPRING HARBOR, NEW YORK--Even though a draft sequence of the human genome is nearing completion, biologists still have widely varied estimates of how many genes it contains. Now, they...

18 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Napoleon Death Debate Continues

by Constance Holden

When Napoleon died in exile on the island of St. Helena in 1821, was he poisoned by arsenic, or did he succumb to stomach cancer as his doctors said? The...

18 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Molecular Hairpins That Compute

by Adrian Cho

Not only can DNA spell out life, it also can be used to solve tough math and logic problems--a technology that won't find its way into your laptop computer anytime...

18 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Male Chimps, Slackers With a Map

by Dan Ferber

LISLE, ILLINOIS--Like an oblivious dad behind the wheel, male chimps don't pay as much attention to landmarks as females do. But they can do just as well if penalized for...

18 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Gene Therapy Could Aid Hearing

by Adrian Cho

A healthy dose of a single protein makes crucial sensory cells grow anew in tissue from the ears of rat pups. The finding, reported in the June issue of Nature...

17 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Successful Transplant for Diabetes Reported

by Gretchen Vogel

A new transplant technique has allowed eight diabetic patients to completely quit their insulin injections. The study, described this morning at the Transplant 2000 meeting in Chicago, is "truly a...

17 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Sanger Taps Homegrown Talent

by Michael Balter

After nearly a year's search, the Sanger Centre, a major genome sequencing institute near Cambridge, U.K., has found a new director. Mouse geneticist Allan Bradley, 40, of Baylor College of...

17 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

The Comet That Nobody Saw

by Alexander Hellemans

Professional astronomers and amateurs alike scan the sky continuously, looking for new, undiscovered objects. But in 1997 they spectacularly missed a comet tearing through the solar system, says a team...

16 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Getting Down With NSF

by Jeffrey Mervis

Think peer review is tough? Try party review. The National Science Foundation (NSF) hopes to stage a December gala to cap its yearlong 50th anniversary celebration. But the National Science...

16 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Tragedy Strikes South Pole Station

by Erik Stokstad

A young astrophysicist has died at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Rodney Marks, 32, was the sole operator of the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO). The loss has...

16 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

China to Sequence Hybrid Rice Genome

by Li Hui

BEIJING--China last week announced plans to sequence the entire genome of a hybrid rice variety that its scientists have developed over the past 2 decades. The project is a first...

16 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

Science Academies Establish Global Council

by Robert Koenig

The world's science academies agreed at a 14 May confab in Tokyo to establish an international version of the U.S. National Research Council. The new InterAcademy Council (IAC) will organize...

15 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

The Roots of Software

by Barry Cipra

Can anyone remember when "software" wasn't on the tongue of every schoolchild? But it had to start somewhere. And Fred R. Shapiro, a librarian and etymologist at Yale Law School,...

15 May 2000 | ScienceNOW

U.S. to get Science-Savvy Diplomacy

by David Malakoff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--It's official: The State Department is looking for some science-savvy diplomats. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright today announced that her agency will boost its technical expertise by hiring a...

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