Category Archives: news briefs

People feel pain differently, and brain scans prove it, Robert Coghill of Wake Forest University and his colleagues reported last week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their experiment, the researchers put … Continue reading →

The sky’s not the limit for lightning discoveries: In the past few years, scientists have observed new high-altitude electrical phenomena called sprites, elves, and blue jets. Now Han-Tzong Su of National Cheng Kung University of Taiwan and his colleagues report … Continue reading →

Are you a night owl late for your day job again? Tell your boss to blame your genes. British researchers from the University of Surrey report in Sleep, the journal of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep … Continue reading →

Researchers from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology of Japan are growing decaffeinated coffee plants. Shinjiro Ogita and colleagues report in the June 19 Nature that they have genetically modified coffee plants to repress a key caffeine-making gene, thereby … Continue reading →

Just like bats (and submarines), dolphins send out sonar signals to navigate as well as home in on prey. They emit high-pitched sounds and then process the echoes that are bounced back from distant objects to obtain a picture of … Continue reading →

Hairy humans just aren’t sexy, report British researchers in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters last week. That’s the reason why humans are hairless, instead of furry like almost all other mammals. The old theory of human hairlessness supposes that we … Continue reading →

Art historians know that in 1889 Vincent van Gogh painted one of his masterpieces, “Moonrise,” but they were never able to pinpoint the exact moment portrayed in the painting. (Never let it be said that art historians are less obsessed … Continue reading →

Male dragonflies appear to be extraordinarily wily when in pursuit of rivals in their territories: they can fly in such a way that they appear completely motionless to their foes, a technique known as motion camouflage. Akiko Mizutani of Australian … Continue reading →

You don’t usually want to get too close to a colony of seabirds, unless you really enjoy the smell of bird excrement. But perhaps smelling a crested auklet colony wouldn’t be so bad — the highly social Alaskan seabirds (right) … Continue reading →

Only relatively recently have scientists discovered the secret behind the gecko’s extraordinary ability to hang from a glass ceiling by a single toe: its feet are covered by millions of tiny hairs, each of which act together to provide the … Continue reading →