Science News

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are encouraging U.S. policymakers to consider the nation's growing supply of natural gas as a short-term substitute for aging coal-fired power plants .

In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.

The North American and Pacific plates meet in California at the San Andreas Fault. The plates grind past each other there at as much as an inch-and-a-half a year. Until the plates jam. Then energy builds up, and eventually they lurch--an earthquake.

But on some active portions of the fault, the plates tend to just creep along, without many violent jerks. All thanks, it turns out, to a little mineral lube, according to a study in the journal Geology . [Anja Schleicher, Ben van der Pluijm and Laurence Warr, http://bit.ly/cDpHCQ ]

Had a hard day? It might not be your abstract experiences that are causing you to think that way, but rather the physical surfaces you're touching . [More]

Three-dimensional movies are everywhere these days, and the novelty is poised to become a big-screen mainstay. Now the field of microscopy is getting into the act, too, but the end product is very different from 3-D movies such as Toy Story 3 or Avatar . [More]

Morphine is often a cancer patient's best and final friend. So it came as a shock when researchers at the University of Minnesota published a study showing that doses of morphine similar to those used to ease pain actually spurred the growth of human breast cancer cells grafted into mice. "These results indicate that clinical use of morphine could potentially be harmful" in some cancer patients, the scientists wrote in 2002 in Cancer Research . [More]

JULY

7–10 Upon winning a gold medal, most Olympic athletes have identical emotional reactions--tears of joy, passionate hugs and glowing smiles. Psychologist David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University noticed, however, that after the initial rush wears off, athletes exhibit a range of emotional expressions. He attributes this variation to cultural differences. For instance, Americans are more likely to maintain their jubilant demeanor, whereas Japanese athletes will try to cover up their emotions--say, by neutralizing their joy with a straight face. At the 20th Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology , Matsumoto, who is the keynote speaker, and other presenters will explain how and why expressions of emotion differ among cultures. [More]

By Eric Hand

After the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) settled into orbit around the red planet in 1997, a magnetometer on board began sending back measurements that have puzzled planetary scientists ever since. [More]