Science News Headline and Article Archive

The Colors of an Equation's Roots
- Over the centuries, mathematicians have developed a variety of methods of solving equations. Using the capabilities of modern computers, they have explored in detail how these age-old recipes work—when the methods can be relied upon, when they fail, and when they behave strangely. Such computer explorations have also yielded vivid visual representations of the underlying mathematical processes.
Ancient Village Located in Illinois
- Digging crews have found hundreds of1,200-year-old stone arrowheads and pottery fragments buried under an Illinois hillside. The discovery near this village about 35 miles east of St. Louis represents an important archaeological find, said Brad Koldehoff, a state archaeologist. "It's a significant site. They discovered a keyhole-shaped house and what appears to be a small village," he said.

Week of 20 April 2003

Hurricane Winds Carried Ocean Salt & Plankton Far Inland
- Researchers found surprising evidence of sea salt and frozen plankton in high, cold, cirrus clouds, the remnants of Hurricane Nora, over the U.S. plains states. Although the 1997 hurricane was a strong eastern Pacific storm, her high ice-crystal clouds extended many miles inland, carrying ocean phenomena deep into the U.S. heartland.

Week of 6 April 2003

Spider silk delivers finest optical fibers
- Delicate threads of spider's silk are about to solve a major problem in photonics: how to make hollow optical fibers narrow enough to carry light beams around the fastest nanoscale optical circuits. To make the fibers, Yushan Yan and a team of engineers from the University of California at Riverside give the sik thread a glassy coating, and then extract the silk by baking. They soon expect to be able to make hollow fibers with cores just two nanometers wide - or 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.