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Science
Last updated October 1, 2008.
Danger in the Forest
September 25, 2008
DEEP IN THE MAYA BIOSPHERE RESERVE, GUATEMALA—Armed men near a stopped white truck face us—one gripping a shotgun, another slashing a nearby branch with a machete. They glare at us menacingly as we drive by. “That was a perfect place to kill someone,” half jokes our guide, Javier.
This story was featured on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
Mammoth Sequences: A Hunt for DNA from the Extinct Titans of the Klondike
September 2008
After revving up with a roar, a core drill designed to punch holes in concrete begins digging into ice more than 100,000 years old. Here in the Klondike, the drill serves as a kind of gas-powered, handheld time machine, bringing up frozen earth from the Pleistocene, when mammoths and other megafauna once ruled. In a land where miners still hunt for gold, paleomammalogist Ross Mac–Phee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and his colleagues seek a different kind of treasure—DNA from extinct titans.
Go here to read the original blogs from the Yukon.
Go here to see a slideshow of pictures from the Yukon.
Go here to see video clips from the Yukon.
At Trading Crossroads, Permafrost Yields Siberian Secrets
January 6, 2004
In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates -- burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before.
Bottled
baby octopuses turn out to be pygmies
September 24, 2002
In century-old jars of alcohol on museum shelves in Paris and Washington
and off the coasts of Indonesia, Senegal and the Caribbean, zoologists
are stumbling upon dozens of species of tiny octopuses once believed to
be babies of their larger relatives.
Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth
September 19, 2006
Scientists could generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007.
Digging up Dinosaurs ... and Keeping the Bones
August 2, 2006
It's 110 degrees at the end of July here in the badlands around the border of North Dakota and Montana as the pickaxes swing down against the Hell Creek rock. The volunteers who have braved rattlesnakes and scorpions to work here in the swirling dust may look as if they are in prison, but they are in a time machine, traveling back 65 million years by excavating through rock. And if these volunteers are lucky, they can keep bones they find.
Origin
of World's Largest Gold Deposit Found?
September 23, 2002
The radioactive decay of metal specks inside South African
gold nuggets may have helped an international team of scientists determine
the origin of the world's largest gold deposit.
Secrets
of the Stradivarius: An Interview with Joseph Nagyvary
June 10, 2002
"I remember that taking out the violin from its glass cabinet was
almost a religious experience for me," Nagyvary says.
It's
Not Easy to Derail a Roach
August 26, 2002
By sticking tiny cannons on the backs of cockroaches to see how their recoil jars the insects' balance, researchers have added firepower to a new mathematical model that explains how roaches move so nimbly. The model has already helped them design a better robot bug. (Scanned article -- JPEG
file.)
This article was the subject of a column by Dave Barry
that ran in The
Miami Herald and The
Washington Post.
Multilingual
Machines
July 15, 2002
"Gist" translations by commercially available software translate
with only 70 to 80 percent accuracy. Will statistical-analysis techniques
improve that performance?
Sounds
Realer Than Reality
June 3, 2002
Hollywood may soon be able to craft acoustic illusions that sound even
better than the real thing. (Scanned article -- JPEG file.)
Photonics
lets there be light without a hot bulb
May 8, 2002
The light bulb isn't a terribly bright idea.
Dragonslayers
may share ancient Roman roots
September 10, 2001
Dragonslaying legends from fairy tales, classic operas and modern fantasy
may find roots in an ancient cult of Roman soldiers.
Winter's
thief
January 12, 2000
So what happened to the cold? A little girl stole it.
Turning
farm pests into living factories
April 14, 2000
Twenty to 60 caterpillars are ground up, or 'homogenized,' with a foot-long
device called a polytron, which resembles a butter churn with a knife
at the end of its stick. "We make a little milkshake out of them,"
Hale said. "The first grinding is pretty gross."
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