Category Archives: news briefs

Saturn’s moon, Titan, has always been rather mysterious: Its thick nitrogen atmosphere and methane clouds have made observations of its surface difficult. But now Donald Campbell of Cornell University and his colleagues report in the Oct. 2 Science online that … Continue reading →

Fugitive gorillas like Little Joe may be getting all the headlines, but zoos may have a more long-term problem on their hands: Stressing out their captive carnivores. A new study by British zoologists in the Oct. 2 Nature says that … Continue reading →

Have you ever noticed how some people look eerily like their dogs and vice versa? Now there’s genetic evidence to account for some of those similarities. Researchers from the Institute for Genomic Research, working with J. Craig Venter and others … Continue reading →

Astronomers from the University of Massachusetts and the University of Virginia announced last week that they have proof that the Milky Way is a cannibal, gobbling up the tiny Sagittarius galaxy. The researchers have mapped the full extent of Sagittarius … Continue reading →

Stone-age Brits quickly gave up eating fish when meat and grains became easily available, researchers report in the Sept. 25 Nature. Archeologist Michael P. Richards of the University of Bradford, UK, and his colleagues analyzed human bones from coastal and … Continue reading →

Boston can be a confusing place to drive, so thank goodness you’ve got all sorts of different cells in your brain to help you navigate your way. In a study published in the Sept. 11 Nature, Michael J. Kahana of … Continue reading →

In 1066, the Norman invasion; in 1588, the Spanish Armada. Invasion dates: What would history books and trivia games be without them? And now perhaps a new date can be added to the annals: 470,000,000 BC, the date plants invaded … Continue reading →

Just like humans, capuchin monkeys have been found to have a sense of fairness, say researchers from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta. In their study, published in the Sept. 18 Nature, Sarah Brosnan and … Continue reading →

NASA has set Galileo, the spacecraft that has been studying Jupiter and its moons since 1995, on a collision course with the planet, the crash to occur this Sunday. The craft, which is running low on fuel, is being directed … Continue reading →

There’s a major influx of stardust in our solar system and it’s coming in at a rate three times faster than it did six years ago — and could triple again by 2013, according to measurements taken by the spacecraft, … Continue reading →