Featured series 
Year: 2004
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Science & Tech
Tiniest droplets produced from triangular nozzles
Ultra-tiny taps – which could, in theory, create drops just 8 billionths of a millimeter in size – might prove a boon for technologies that employ sprays of costly materials.…
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Science & Tech
Have light, will not travel
Harvard researchers fired a short signal pulse of red laser light into a sealed glass cylinder containing a hot gas of rubidium atoms illuminated by a strong control beam. While…
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Health
Scorpion venom blocks bone loss
Rats given kalitoxin, from scorpion venom, enjoyed 84 percent less jawbone loss than those that didn’t get the injections. “We are very excited because this is the first demonstration that…
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Health
Keeping synapses clean may hold key to fear-conditioning
As readers of introductory psychology texts know, animals easily learn to fear a harmless stimulus, such as a tone, if that stimulus is paired with a painful one, such as…
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Health
MRI scan shows promise in treating bipolar disorder
A study published in the Jan. 1, 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry had a surprising start. As Michael Rohan, imaging physicist in McLean Hospital’s Brain Imaging Center,…
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Health
For-profit health plans did not restrict Medicare beneficiaries’ use of high-cost operative procedures
Testing the hypothesis that rates of use of 12 high-cost procedures would be lower in for-profit health plans than in not-for-profit plans, researchers analyzed Medicare HEDIS (Health Plan Employer Data…
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Science & Tech
Raging storms of hot and cold gas
New observations with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), Hubble’s high-precision and ultra-sensitive spectrometer, show that the warm chromosphere of Betelgeuse extends out to more than 50 times its radius…
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Science & Tech
Lifeless suns dominated early universe
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they…
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Science & Tech
Suns of all ages possess comets, maybe planets
Astronomers observed a comet puffing out huge amounts of carbon, one of the key elements for life. The comet also emitted large amounts of water vapor as the Sun’s heat…
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Science & Tech
Young star caught speeding
Findings linking a speeding star to its birthplace provide direct observational support of theoretical simulations predicting that protostars can be tossed out of a young cluster. This is the first…
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Health
Coffee cuts diabetes risk
More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of a study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and…