Mason Inman - science journalist

3 July 2007, for National Geographic News

We may be able to get a glimpse of what happened before the big bang, thanks to a new study—but only a glimpse.

The big bang has traditionally been seen as the beginning of everything—space, time, matter, and energy.

2 July 2007, for National Geographic News

Arctic ponds that have hosted diverse ecosystems for thousands of years are now disappearing because of global warming, according to a new study.

These ponds, which lie atop bedrock, freeze solid in the winter and then melt for a few months each summer, becoming hot spots of activity in the forbidding Arctic terrain. 

28 June 2007, for National Geographic News

People in the Americas began growing domesticated crops more than 10,000 years ago, according to a new study.

Ancient squash seeds, peanuts, and cotton balls found in the Peruvian Andes show that farming got started in the New World at about the same time that the first domesticated crops appeared in the Near East.

25 June 2007, for National Geographic News

Today the only place to see woolly mammoths and people side-by-side is on The Flintstones or in the movies.

But researchers are on the verge of piecing together complete genomes of long-dead species such as Neandertals and mammoths. (See a brief overview of human genetics.)

17 June 2007, for New Scientist

A device that can hold hundreds of atoms in a 3D array, and image each one individually, has been developed by scientists in the US.

The machine is an important stepping stone towards the development of a quantum computer, they say.

14 June 2007, for Nature Network Boston

Boston researchers are bringing new cancer drug delivery technologies to the clinic.

Cancer treatments are notorious for being blunt instruments; chemotherapy and radiation kill healthy cells along with cancerous ones, causing major side effects.

4 June 2007, for National Geographic News

The greatest testament we have today to the sailing abilities of the ancient Polynesians may be found in a few ancient chicken bones, a new study reveals.

The bones, which scientists recently dug up from a site on the central coast of Chile, offer a startling conclusion: Polynesians beat Columbus to the Americas by probably a century or more, arriving at the latest in the early 1400s.

30 May 2007, for New Scientist

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, which let users trade movies, music and software online, are increasingly being used to trick PCs into attacking other machines, experts say.

Computer scientists have previously shown how P2P networks can be subverted so that several connected PCs gang up to attack a single machine, flooding it with enough traffic to make it crash. This can work even if the target is not part of the P2P network itself.

29 May 2007, for National Geographic News

If you get tongue-tied when trying to learn a new language, your genes may be to blame, a new study suggests.

While there is no gene yet found that is responsible for preprogramming a person with a given language, there does appear to be a link between types of two genes and the languages people speak.

25 May 2007, for New Scientist

A silicon light-emitting diode (LED) that can quickly switch between producing red and blue light could ultimately lead to smaller pixels for high-resolution displays.

LEDs can normally only emit light of one colour. A new study shows that adding a certain rare earth metals can allow them to switch between two colours.