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25 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Lifeless Evolution

by Science News Staff

If there is one theme uniting life-forms from the lowliest virus to the loftiest primate, it's that they all evolve. Now some lifeless strands of RNA are doing the same...

24 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Tugging on the Cell's Tangled Web

by Science News Staff

Scientists have found that mammalian cells are densely "hard-wired" with force-carrying connections that reach all the way from the membrane through the cytoskeleton to the genome. The findings, reported in...

17 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Vaccine Against Baby Killer Scores in Tests

by Science News Staff

SAN FRANCISCO--A therapeutic vaccine against severe rotaviral diarrhea, which kills nearly 900,000 infants worldwide each year, has succeeded in clinical trials. The vaccine works best "to alleviate the outcome of...

16 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Couch Potato's Delight

by Science News Staff

SAN FRANCISCO--Like switching on a miniature furnace in the body, scientists have created a compound that spurs certain fat cells to burn up calories without forcing them to endure jogging,...

15 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Fleeting Fingerprints May Yield Powerful New Tools

by Science News Staff

SAN FRANCISCO--The kidnapping and murder of 3-year-old Katie Lynn Lee in 1993 could leave a lasting legacy to law enforcement: methods to obtain children's fingerprints before they evaporate from crime...

14 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Tiny Spheres Boost Vaccines

by Science News Staff

SAN FRANCISCO--A single injection of microscopic plastic capsules could someday eliminate the need for vaccination booster shots. The new technique, described here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American...

10 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Instrumental to Many's Success

by Science News Staff

Today is the 97th birthday of American inventor and chemist Arnold Beckman. Asked by California growers to find a way to measure the acidity of lemon juice, Beckman, a young...

7 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Nobel Bondage

by Science News Staff

One of the most fruitful decades of chemical research began on 6 April 1931, with a landmark paper by Linus Pauling on the relationship between chemical bonds and the magnetic...

28 March 1997 | ScienceNOW

Gender-Bending Suspects Not Cooperating?

by Science News Staff

The mere thought that long-term exposure to a pesticide might subtly erode your manhood or womanhood sounds chilling enough, but what if two such chemicals combined were hundreds or thousands...

20 March 1997 | ScienceNOW

Brain Racket and Epilepsy

by Science News Staff

Background noise can do more than distract. In certain situations--like the firing of neurons--noise can enhance a signal. Now researchers have shown for the first time that the coordinated activity...

17 March 1997 | 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 35 years ago, in the 16...

13 March 1997 | ScienceNOW

Femtosecond Footage of Methane's Private Life

by Science News Staff

Flickers of laser light can clock the speed of a chemical reaction, timing the knitting and breaking of each molecular bond. Now scientists have rigged this stopwatch to trip a...

6 March 1997 | ScienceNOW

The Song of the Sand

by Science News Staff

You may imagine the desert as quiet rows of drifting dunes. But under the right conditions, some dunes can emit a thunderous boom, and smaller volumes of sand from these...

25 February 1997 | ScienceNOW

Red-Thumb Gardeners to Transform Agriculture?

by Science News Staff

When a team of biochemists spliced a bacterium's gene for making hemoglobin into a tobacco plant, they expected the transgenic plant to be a tad hardier. Instead, they got veritable...

24 February 1997 | ScienceNOW

A Discovery to Dye For

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Carl Graebe, a German organic chemist born in 1841 whose work helped create the synthetic dye industry. Graebe and co-worker C. Liebermann discovered that a...

19 February 1997 | ScienceNOW

Making Antisense of Asthma

by Science News Staff

In a potentially lethal overreaction of the immune system, something as seemingly harmless as dust mites or pollen can leave a person with asthma gasping for air. Drugs provide some...

12 February 1997 | ScienceNOW

Buckyball Amplifier

by Science News Staff

The soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules called fullerenes continue to dazzle scientists, even though they have yet to make a splash in real-world products. Their unique properties, such as their spherical shape,...

6 February 1997 | ScienceNOW

Think Tank Blasts Chemical Regulation

by Science News Staff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Chemical companies have sometimes failed to provide the government with sufficient or relevant data to judge whether a chemical is safe for commercial use, alleges a book released at...

27 January 1997 | ScienceNOW

The Elements Were His Element

by Science News Staff

Victor Goldschmidt, the father of modern geochemistry, was born on this day in 1888. A Swiss-born Norwegian chemist, Goldschmidt was fascinated by the elements, their origins, and their relationships in...

21 January 1997 | ScienceNOW

Tracing Cholesterol's Origins

by Science News Staff

Today is the 85th birthday of Konrad Bloch, the German-born American chemist who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in medicine for figuring out the biochemistry and metabolism of cholesterol. Bloch,...

9 January 1997 | ScienceNOW

Belgian Who First Coined the Word Gas

by Science News Staff

This month marks the anniversary of the birth of pioneering Belgian physician and chemist Joannes Baptista van Helmont, who was born in 1579 (the exact date is unknown). His medical...

23 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Nickel for Your Thoughts

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, a Swedish chemist born in 1722 who is best known for his discovery of nickel and his mineral classification scheme. In 1751,...

9 December 1996 | ScienceNOW

Getting a Grip on Ice

by Science News Staff

Ice has always been a slippery subject. As simple as an ice cube may seem, scientists have long been baffled about why its surface is so slick. But an upcoming...

4 November 1996 | ScienceNOW

Seeds for Stellar Change

by Science News Staff

Chemists have identified a family of compounds that may someday help prevent kidney damage from lupus, a common autoimmune disorder that afflicts up to 2 million Americans. One of the...

9 October 1996 | ScienceNOW

Fullerene Discoverers Win Chemistry Nobel

by Science News Staff

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded today to two Americans and one British researcher for their discovery of fullerenes, a new class of all-carbon molecules shaped like hollow balls....