US News | Science Discoveries

It was once thought that e-mail chain letters traveled to internet users in much the same way that disease spreads during an epidemic--people receive a message and then pass it on to those they come in contact with. However, new research from Cornell University and Carleton College suggests that e-mail chain letters travel in a less direct, more diffuse pattern than previously assumed.

Air pollution from power plants and automobiles is diminishing the fragrance of flowers and thereby inhibiting the ability of pollinating insects to follow scent trails to their source, a new University of Virginia study indicates.

Two researchers at Cornell University argue that children are more likely to tell the truth while under oath in court because their minds depend heavily on remembering what actually occurred, as opposed to adults, whose minds depend heavily on the meaning or interpretation of what occurred.

Thanks to a touch-based interface developed at Carnegie Mellon University, computers that have long been used as tools in designing and manipulating three-dimensional objects may soon provide people with a way to sense or feel the texture of those same objects.

A team of behavioral scientists from four major U.S. universities found that people who feel sad and self-focused are willing to pay more money for goods than those in neutral states of feeling.

MIT and University of Rochester researchers report important advances toward a therapeutic device that has the potential to capture cells as they flow through the blood stream and to treat them. Among other applications, such a device could zap cancer cells spreading to other tissues.

At a time when bat populations are declining worldwide, a new University of Michigan study shows the bat's impact on ecological systems. The study reveals that bats exceed birds in their ability to devour coffee-eating insects on organic coffee farms.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have made it possible to digitally reproduce music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file by recreating in a computer both the real world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have made a breakthrough in the development of green gasoline, a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.

Using global databases and sophisticated computer models to analyze patterns of emerging diseases, scientists from four well-known institutions are able for the first time to plot, map and predict where future pandemics might originate.