Mason Inman - science journalist

20 April 2007, for Nature Network Boston  

Some microbes are adept at making themselves at home in various host species—and spreading disease from one species to another—despite the hosts’ different physiological environments.

According to Tufts researchers, mammals harboring the Lyme disease-causing bacteria unwittingly provide hormone signals that tell the microbe when to prepare to transfer into another host.

19 April 2007, for National Geographic News

Massive stars create "planetary danger zones"—regions of space where extreme solar winds and radiation make planets less likely to form, according to a new study.

The zones extended 1.6 light-years—about 10 trillion miles (16 trillion kilometers)—around so-called O-type stars, which are roughly 20 times bigger than our sun and a million times brighter.

19 April 2007, for New Scientist

A super-hard material that is tough enough to scratch diamond could be made cheaply and easily, a new study suggests.

The material is made from the metal rhenium and the element boron and resembles both a metal and a crystal in structure.

18 April 2007, for Nature Network Boston

Only a handful of professors have fan clubs on Facebook, the social networking website popular among university students.

MIT mathematician Denis Auroux has two (click here and here), which together have more than 200 student members. He is even the star of YouTube videos made by students during his classes and posted online last semester.

13 April 2007, for Nature Network Boston

Dark energy—thought to be driving our universe to expand at a faster rate—has been at work during most of the universe’s 14-billion-year history, a new study shows.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of researchers, including two from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has discovered 21 supernovas, distant exploding stars, most of which are at least half as old as the universe.

13 April 2007, for National Geographic News  

Even at the world's soon-to-be largest particle accelerator—a device that promises to push the boundaries of physics—scientists need to be mindful of one of the most fundamental laws in the universe: Murphy's Law.

In late March, a scant few months before the much anticipated Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is slated to go online, a small but crucial part of the machine broke with a bang.

April/May 2007, for Scientific American Mind

Maybe it is a good thing we don't remember our births. Difficult ones can be traumatic and a major cause of brain damage. 

But researchers now suggest that a maternal hormone may protect our brains during birth, providing a natural safeguard against a problematic delivery. 

April/May 2007, for Scientific American Mind

Our minds are built to wander, according to a new study that argues we have a network of brain regions dedicated to meandering thoughts.

It turns off and on depending on how focused we need to be to complete different tasks.

11 April 2007, for New Scientist

All it takes is a burst of light to make a new class of shape-changing crystals snap into different configurations.

To demonstrate the trick, Japanese researchers created a tiny rod made from the crystal that flings a far-heavier gold sphere when stimulated with light.

14 March 2007, for National Geographic News

An experiment on the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, has smashed a record for sending messages encrypted using the quirks of quantum physics.

The researchers transmitted particles of light, or photons, 90 miles (144 kilometers) while keeping intact a strange invisible tie between the particles known as entanglement.