Outside Edward Beighley's lab, the skies were clear and the air balmy. Inside, Garth Brooks was crooning "Raindrops on the windshield/There's a storm moving in," and the San Diego State University professor was predicting heavy rain - about 1.5 inches over the next few hours.   SHOWER POWER - Keywords: water, irrigation, rain, sprinklers, soil, hydraulics, erosion, Mother Nature. CNS Illustration courtesy of Daniel Wiegard. As co-director of one of the largest soil erosion testing centers in ... [full story]

VERBATIM   PRIME NUMBERS - A scurrying cockroach goes 2.9 mph. CNS Photo.    WHAT IS IT ANSWER - This is a low-power scanning electron microscope image (magnified 20 times) depicting the fourth lumbar vertebra of an 89-year-old woman. CNS Photo.    SUGAR HIGH - To eat, the long-tailed nectar bat Glossophaga soricina must swoop down upon a flower, then hover like a hummingbird while its long, thin tongue scoops out nectar. CNS Photo.    POETRY FOR SCIENTISTS - Digging for fossils, ... [full story]

So what does an underwater cage full of white sea bass miles out in the ocean have to do with a sugar beet farm in northern Utah? Everything, as far as Donald Kent is concerned.   AQUACULTURE AMBASSADOR - Donald Kent, president of the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, has led the nonprofit for more than a decade. CNS Photo by John Gibbins. It was a sugar beet farm that sustained Kent's father, Sidney Kent, and his family during ... [full story]

PRIME NUMBERS   VERBATIM - 'It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage of my life. -- American Physician and Essayist Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) CNS Photo.    OLD JOKES - Researchers suggest that age-related cognitive decline is at least partly the reason why older adults seem to have ... [full story]

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE   SATURN TURNS 60 - A powerful wide-angle camera aboard the orbiting Cassini spacecraft snapped a picture revealing a 60th moon around the ringed planet in May. CNS Photo.    ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE - Prolonged drought and a scarcity of carcasses has prompted reports of vultures in Spain attacking live animals. CNS Photo.    WHAT IS IT? - This is a scanning electron microscope image of normal circulating human blood, which includes a diverse assemblage of cells: red blood ... [full story]

ELECTRON INK   POETRY FOR SCIENTISTS - The Johns Hopkins University Press has recently published volume six of 'The Papers of Thomas A. Edison,' covering April 1881 through March 1883. CNS Photo.    CLOSET SPACE - Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are designing a sleek BioSuit of nylon and spandex that looks more like something Spider-Man might wear for future astronauts. CNS Photo.    HOUSE CENTIPEDE - The What's That Bug Web site at www.whatsthatbug.com will help you ... [full story]

BRAIN SWEAT   PRIME NUMBERS - A human eyeball weighs 1 ounce. CNS Photo.    SECOND STRING - The combined pressure of all of the strings of a grand piano comes to 20 tons. CNS Photo.     HALF-LIFE - Researchers say that some groups of birds, those with red, yellow and orange plumage based on carotenoids, have declined more than other species in the forest near Chernobyl. CNS Photo.    SCOPE SCOOPS - The Hubble Space Telescope has been producing astounding, unprecedented ... [full story]

CORVALLIS, Oregon – A team of Oregon State University scientists monitoring near-shore ocean conditions off Oregon says that oxygen levels in the lower water column have plummeted, thrusting the region into a hypoxic event for the sixth consecutive year. Hypoxia can lead to significant marine die-offs, the researchers say, depending on the severity, duration and location of the low-oxygen zone. Although conditions this summer have not yet duplicated the severity of the historic hypoxic event ... [full story]

WASHINGTON - Cassini scientists may have identified the source of one of Saturn's more mysterious rings. Saturn's G ring likely is produced by relatively large, icy particles that reside within a bright arc on the ring's inner edge.The particles are confined within the arc by gravitational effects from Saturn's moon Mimas. Micrometeoroids collide with the particles, releasing smaller, dust-sized particles that brighten the arc. The plasma in the giant planet's magnetic field sweeps through this ... [full story]

Astro­no­mers have be­lieved for dec­ades that most of the mat­ter in the cos­mos is un­seen. It be­trays it­self only through its gravita­t­ional pull on vis­i­ble ob­jects, whose move­ments are of­ten hard to ex­plain with­out this “dark mat­ter.”And the past year has seen in­creas­ingly bold claims that as­tro­no­mers have “proved” the stuff’s ex­ist­ence.De­spite that, there’s a core of doubt­ers who are­n’t go­ing away. Many of them are stick­ing by an al­ter­na­tive the­o­ry that holds that tweak­ing ... [full story]

A new brain stimula­t­ion treat­ment awak­ened a pa­tient from a near-veg­e­ta­tive state, re­search­ers re­ported Wed­nes­day.“The pre­vi­ously non-verbal pa­tient be­came ca­pa­ble of nam­ing ob­jects and us­ing ob­jects with his hands — for ex­am­ple, bring­ing a cup to his mouth,” wrote Michael N. Shadlen and Roozbeh Kiani of the Un­ivers­ity of Wash­ing­ton Med­i­cal School in Se­at­tle, Wash. in the Aug. 2 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture. “More­o­ver, he could swal­low food and take meals by mouth,” ... [full story]

In the United States, blacks con­victed of kill­ing whites are not only more likely than oth­er kill­ers to get a death sen­tence—they’re al­so like­li­er to ac­tu­ally be ex­e­cut­ed, a new study sug­gests.The chances of be­ing con­demned and of be­ing put to death are quite dif­fer­ent, as “less than 10 per­cent of those giv­en the death sen­tence ev­er get ex­e­cut­ed,” said Da­vid Ja­cobs, co-author of the study. Most of the oth­ers have their sen­tences over­turned on ... [full story]

ANTHROPOLOGY 101 The Inuits of the Bering Strait once kept the bladders of every animal they killed in the belief that the animal's soul resided there. Once a year, all of the collected bladders would be pushed through a hole in the ice so the animals could be reborn and hunted again. VERBATIM   VERBATIM - The best defense against the atom bomb is not to be there when it goes off. -- British Army Journal. ... [full story]