class=”txtLink”>#1: Vaccine Phobia Becomes a Public-Health Threat

01.25.2010
Autism research is progressing quickly, but without a solid diagnosis, some still blame vaccines.

#2: NASA Braces for Course Correction

After the end of the disastrous space shuttle program, it’s not at all clear where the space agency is going—or if it has enough money, skills, or buy-in to get there.
01.25.2010

#3: Meet Ardi, Your First Human Ancestor

A big analysis of the 4.4-million-year-old fossil shows that humans left the trees before leaving the forest and getting much smarter.
01.25.2010

#4: Stem Cell Science Takes Off

Obama brought a big policy improvement, and researchers made big leaps with the science.
01.25.2010

#5: Astronomer Alan Dressler

Hot on the trail of the first galaxies in the universe
01.25.2010

#6: Swine Flu Outbreak Sweeps the Globe

A scary build-up leads to a mostly mild conclusion.
01.25.2010

#7: The Graphene Revolution

Flexible, see-through, one-atom-thick sheets of carbon could be a key component for futuristic solar cells, batteries, and roll-up LCD screens—and perhaps even microchips.
01.25.2010

#8: Earth-like Worlds Come Into View

Newly discovered planets are becoming ever smaller, lighter, and more familiar to us earthlings.
01.25.2010

#9: Experimental Coal Plant Stashes CO2 Underground

If FutureGen can successfully sequester its emissions, it could be a model for clean energy in the future.
01.25.2010

#10: Economist George Loewenstein

He explains the psychology behind the current financial meltdown—and how we can overcome our dark side.
01.25.2010

#11: The Age of Genetic Medicine Begins

After years of setbacks and failures, gene therapy begins to produce some viable cures.
01.25.2010

#12: Oldest Animal Fossils Uncovered

Sponges may have sprung up in special mini-ecosystems 850 million years ago.
01.25.2010

#13: Hope for HIV Vaccine

In the unforgiving world of AIDS vaccines, even a modestly protective effect is big news.
01.25.2010

#14: Intact Tissue Found in Dinosaur

“This type of preservation isn’t supposed to be possible,” says Mary Schweitzer, the guru of finding well-preserved dinosaurs. “But here it is.”
01.25.2010

#15: Model Solves Fundamental Packing Problem

How do different-sized spheres fit into a large container?
01.25.2010

#16: The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing

Bombing our closest neighbor pays off with a trove of information.
01.25.2010

#17: The Common Cold Is Decoded

And now we have a potential target: parts of the genome that are found within all 100 strains of sequenced cold viruses.
01.25.2010

#18: Rise of the Mind Readers

fMRI gives unprecedented views of the mind in action.
01.25.2010

#19: New Battery Tech Could Transform the Car

More power, faster charge, happier atmosphere.
01.25.2010

#20: Can a Shock to the Brain Cure Depression?

Deep brain stimulation is looking like a viable treatment for a growing list of brain issues.
01.25.2010

#21: Fresh Hints of Life on Mars

Could underground life be emitting methane clouds during warm periods?
01.25.2010

#22: Clear-Cutting Has a High Cost

Selling the lumber gets money in the short term but is a “lose-lose-lose” in the long term.
01.25.2010

#23: Computer Learns to Reason Like Isaac Newton

Data-heavy phenomena like gene regulation may be too complicated for human scientists to pin down.
01.25.2010

#24: World’s First Grain Silos Discovered

The agricultural revolution may have started earlier than we thought.
01.25.2010

#25: Skip a Meal, Extend Your Life

Life-long calorie restriction seems to lead to longer lives.
01.25.2010

#26: Biologist J. Craig Venter

The pioneering scientist/entrepreneur on biology’s next leap: digitally designed life-forms that could produce novel drugs, renewable fuels, and plentiful food for tomorrow’s world.
01.25.2010

#27: Genetic Disease Cured Using Cellular Shell Game

By swapping some of one mother’s genes for another, an offspring can end up without birth defects (but with two mothers).
01.25.2010

#28: Probe Shows Mercury’s Hidden Face

Messenger shows how the surface was formed and how the surface forms the atmosphere.
01.25.2010

#29: Richer Nations Can Expect Another Baby Boom

The most developed countries seem to reverse a trend of decreasing fertility.
01.25.2010

#30: Human Hunters Accelerate the Pace of Evolution

If people want bucks with big horns, it pays to not have big horns.
01.25.2010

#31: Sun’s Changes Have Surprise Effects on Earth’s Weather

A subtle change in solar activity affects the atmosphere and oceans, altering weather in the Pacific.
01.25.2010

#32: Fake DNA Fools Crime Lab

The science is accurate, but the sample may not be.
01.25.2010

#33: The Most Amazing New Species of the Year

The smallest snake, biggest stick insect, smallest sea horse, and a tree that kills itself by flowering.
01.25.2010

#34: Computers Go Quantum

Researchers create the first quantum computer on a silicon chip. Making it more powerful will be even harder.
01.25.2010

#35: Neanderthals Get Personal

Researchers sequence most of their genome and say they probably spoke much like we did.
01.25.2010

#36: Diarrhea Vaccine Could Save Millions

Tagging the E. coli toxin with a larger molecule could allow the immune system to fight it off.
01.25.2010

#37: Algae Might Be a Source of Clean, Renewable Diesel Fuel

“At the beginning we’d tell people, ‘I know this sounds crazy,’” says Bryan Willson, a Colorado State University engineer and cofounder of Solix Biofuels.
01.25.2010

#38: A Smart Makeover for the Electrical Grid

“The grid needs to evolve from one-way wires and cables… We need the marriage of energy technology and information technology.”
01.25.2010

#39: Math—Combined With GPS—Could Fix Traffic Jams

Traffic jams are mathematically like explosions. Drivers armed with info can defuse the bomb.
01.25.2010

#40: Quantum Strangeness Leaks Into the Big World

Four ions can become quantum entangled. Why not a human?
01.25.2010

#41: The Freaky Fish With the See-through Head

The barreleye always looks up, through its own head, to find food.
01.25.2010

#42: Scientists Watch Pathogens as They Cause Infection

New imaging techniques show viruses and bacteria in action.
01.25.2010

#44: Spaceport Breaks Ground in New Mexico

The $200 million Spaceport America broke ground in June not far from the restricted airspace of the White Sands Missile Range.
01.25.2010

#43: Five Big Additions to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

He had the main idea right, but in the past 150 years, scientists have filled out a lot more of the picture.
01.25.2010

#45: Eye Drops Could Cure Glaucoma

Applying nerve growth factor may save people from going blind to to pressure in the eye.
01.25.2010

#46: First-Ever Dinosaur Mummy Puts Flesh on the Bones

The amount of skin indicates how muscular the hadrosaur was and, consequently, how fast it could run.
01.25.2010

#48: Twin Black Holes Found

In theory the universe should be littered with black hole multiples, but they haven’t been easy to locate.
01.25.2010

#47: El Niño’s Cousin Spurs Hurricanes

The discovery of a separate but hard-to-spot weather pattern could help give better storm predictions.
01.25.2010

#49: Space Trash Causes Orbital Crash

The first collision of two operative spacecraft signals the mess that has become the orbital space around Earth.
01.25.2010

#50: Magnetic Mysteries of Sunspots Decoded

A new computer model could predict “space weather” before it affects earth.
01.25.2010

#51: Oldest Musical Instrument Found

35,000 years ago, humans in what’s now Germany were making sophisticated flutes from the bones of griffon vultures.
01.03.2010

#52: Courts Consider Who Owns the Human Genome

Myriad Genetics owns the patent over certain breast cancer genes, effectively giving them ownership over any test involving the genes.
01.03.2010

#53: The Fat That Can Make You Thin

Babies use brown fat to burn calories and keep warm. Now researchers discover that adults have some of the special tissue, as well.
12.30.2009

#54: Seismic Waves Reveal the Thickness of Tectonic Plates: ~50 Miles

By analyzing how waves change speed and direction, researchers were able to locate the boundary between rigid tectonic plates and the hot, pliable asthenosphere.
12.30.2009

#55: Virus Invades Human Genome and Causes… Chronic Fatigue?

Clever sleuthing finds a connection between a virus associated with cancer and the mysterious “yuppie flu.”
12.30.2009

#56: Earth-like Storms Mysteriously Appear on Saturn’s Moon Titan

“For so long, it was cloud-free. Then, all of a sudden, they dramatically appeared.”
12.29.2009

#57: Robots Get Off Their Butts & Learn to Walk

Autonomous machines are getting better at better at the ongoing controlled falling known as “walking” among us humans.
12.29.2009

#58: Orangutans Use Tool to Lower the Sound of Their Voices

By putting leaves between their lips, the apes apparently make themselves sound bigger and more threatening.
12.29.2009

#59: Amazing Images of the Heart of the Milky Way

Earth’s placement on one of the outer arms of the galaxy gives us a view of what’s happening in the center.
12.29.2009

#60: Geographer Mark Serreze

He says a big Arctic melt is inevitable and readies us for what comes next.
12.28.2009

#61: Child Abuse Leaves Its Mark on Victim’s DNA

The brains of people who were abused as children and then commit suicide show DNA modifications that made them particularly sensitive to stress.
12.28.2009

#62: Sooth-Saying Science—First-Ever Prediction of a Meteor

Telescopes spotted it, computers traced it, onlookers watched it, and students picked up the pieces.
12.28.2009

#63: Did NASA’s Phoenix Find Liquid Water on Mars?

If fluid water does persist on Mars, life could be hanging on in thin layers of salty water just beneath the surface.
12.28.2009

#64: DEET Might Harm the Nervous System

“It’s funny that after 60 years, there are still many things we don’t know about this compound.”
12.28.2009

#65: Hot Climate Produced Giant, Croc-Eating Snake

The 40-foot monster is helping scientists figure out what happened in our hotter past—and perhaps what awaits us in the future.
12.27.2009

#66: Girls Hit Puberty Earlier Around the World

Better nutrition and synthetic estrogens seem to be bringing early maturation to China, Denmark, and the U.S.
12.27.2009

#67: Where Do Enceladus’ Mysterious Geysers Come From?

Ammonia spotted in the jets could act as antifreeze in under-ice oceans.
12.26.2009

#68: Computer Program Cracks Cipher That Stumped Thomas Jefferson

A twist and some dummy letters camouflaged words that Jefferson would have easily recognized: the Preamble to the Declaration.
12.26.2009

#69: Science Sets Its Eyes on the Prize

Big money awaits innovators who can build rockets, sequence genomes, predict people’s movie preferences, harvest energy from the tides, or explore the Moon.
12.25.2009

#70: Ancestral Whales May Have Given Birth on Land

Modern whale babies come out tail first to prevent drowning. A new fossil suggests ancestral whales came out the other way.
12.24.2009

#71: First Ground Animals Borrowed Shells

In the harsh dry air, the hermit crab-like animals needed shields to keep their gills warm.
12.24.2009

#72: Tiny Robots Prepare for Surgery

Research groups around the world are developing ingenious robotic devices to improve people’s health.
12.23.2009

#73: Venus Has a Secret Earth-Like Past

A few billions of years ago, the planet may have had water, plate tectonics, and volcanism—and might have been a decent place to live.
12.23.2009

#74: Hydrogen Energy Gets Two Big Boosts

One research group has found that an iron-based catalyst works just as well as the platinum catalysts used in fuel cells today.
12.23.2009

#75: Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear

Thanks to our sweat, anxiety—and maybe also other emotions—can be chemically transferred between people.
12.23.2009

#76: Leaping Flying Lizards

Pterosaurs could fly 40 up to miles an hour but were unable to launch themselves like modern birds. So how did these prehistoric giants get off the ground?
12.22.2009

#77: Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids Lead to Life on Earth?

Early organisms apparently survived the Late Heavy Bombardment—which may have made our planet a much comfier place to live.
12.22.2009

#78: California to Get Some Star Power—Literally

The National Ignition Facility starts warming up for its main act: nuclear fusion research.
12.22.2009

#79: Sonic Black Hole Created in Lab

No atoms could escape the void within the cloud: “It’s like trying to swim upstream in a river whose current is faster than you.”
12.22.2009

#80: Chimps Plan Ahead. (Plan #1: Throw Rocks at Humans.)

“Santino has a great time scaring visitors, and as the group’s dominant male, he is showing the other chimps that he can protect them.”
12.21.2009

#81: Inserting Human Gene Into Mouse Brains Gives Them Lower Voices

Researchers don’t know exactly what FOXP2 does in humans, but it’s the gene most directly linked to speech that we know of.
12.21.2009

#82: Humans Took Care of the Disabled Over 500,000 Years Ago

The deformed skull of a 10-year-old child means that there was 10 years of intense support for the child.
12.21.2009

#83: Like Magnets, Light Can Attract and Repel Itself

The attraction and repulsion effects make up what is known as the “optical force,” a newly observed phenomenon that works on microscopic scales.
12.21.2009

#84: Dear Liza, Now There’s a Hole in Jupiter

A comet or asteroid had slams into Jupiter with the force of 2 billion tons of TNT, blowing a giant hole in the clouds over the gas giant.
12.20.2009

#85: Fossilized Plankton Show the Effect of Fossil Fuels

Researchers develop a clever new technique to more accurately gauge historical levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
12.20.2009

#86: Particle-Smasher John Ellis

The CERN theoretical physicist looks ahead to what will happen when the LHC gets cranked up to full power.
12.19.2009

#87: Mockingbirds Know Who You Are… And They Hold a Grudge

The birds learned to identify an aggressive researcher and ignore the others—and eventually they dive-bombed the malefactor.
12.19.2009

#88: Alzheimer’s Genes Located

These findings mark the first time any Alzheimer’s genes have been picked from the proverbial haystack in genomic studies.
12.19.2009

#89: Radiation Is What Turns Your Hair Gray

A few DNA-damaging zaps turns stem cells in the follicle from reproduction machines into normal, mortal cells.
12.18.2009

#90: Fossil Bonanza for an Animal That Doesn’t Fossilize: The Octopus

“The preservation of these soft-bodied creatures is the result of a chain of lucky chances.” Paleontologists hit the luckiest stash of all in Lebanon.
12.18.2009

#91: The Strange Process That Made Earth’s Oxygen

Less volcanism led to a “nickel famine,” which led to the downfall of methanogens, which led to the rise of cyanobacteria, which led to the boom in oxygen, which led to us.
12.18.2009

#92: Nowhere to Hide From the Buzz of Civilization

An ever-expanding network of roads, railways, rivers, and shipping lanes means that only 10 percent of the earth’s surface is now remote.
12.18.2009

#93: Re-Analyzing One of the Greatest Brains in History

The quirks in Einstein’s thinging parts may have reflected his “preference for thinking in sensory impressions, including visual images rather than words.”
12.17.2009

#94: Ecological Surgeons Perform Successful Species Transplant

Two colonies of butterflies flapped their wings in northern England and the resulting debate was felt around the world.
12.17.2009

#95: Hidden Caribou-Hunting Civilization Found Under Lake Huron

Ancient people apparently apparently corralled prey the way modern Siberian hunters do: with giant rock “drive lanes.”
12.17.2009

#96: Microbes Build Better Batteries

Microbes can help wind and solar by storing energy as methane; viruses make clean and cheap batteries.
12.17.2009

#97: Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution

“The biggest, most obvious pattern in nature” is that there are more species in warmer areas. But why that’s the case has been a mystery—until now.
12.16.2009

#98: First Molecule of Life Discovered?

In the beginning there was RNA. RNA begat DNA, and DNA begat lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins: That’s Genesis according to the “RNA world” hypothesis.
12.16.2009

#99: Science Finds God (In the Brain, at Least)

fMRI scans showed thoughts of God brought activation of particular neural pathways, including those in the anterior prefrontal cortex.
12.16.2009

#100: Hubble’s New Mind-Blowing ‘Scopes

The Hubble Space Telescope’s new equipment, including the Wide Field Camera 3, provide even better images of the heavens.
12.16.2009

By Andrew Grant