The Discovery Files

If you want to hear rare Chinese frogs croak, speaking the language won't necessarily help. These frogs can make high-pitched sounds out of human hearing range. Biologists at the University of Illinois have found a particular frog species that has the same ultrasonic communication ability as bats, whales and dolphins. And there may be good reason why Nature has given these critters their own "Frogs 'N Family" plan.

Information gleaned from teeth excavated from a Mexican graveyard suggests Europeans brought African slaves to the New World much earlier than history books tell us. By measuring the amount of strontium in the teeth and comparing it with strontium values around the world, researchers have been able to determine the teeth's age and origin. It's the earliest physical evidence of slave trade in the New World.

Hackers beware! There's a new cyber universe out there--a small scale version of the Internet. It acts like the real thing, but it's not a playground for hackers. It's a test bed for software makers and security providers to find solutions that will thwart any real cyber attackers.

Bloodhounds, take notice! Thanks to researchers at Purdue University, law enforcement officers and forensic pathologists may soon have a new working tool to sniff out trouble--a device they can take to the scene for instant identification. Today's mass spectrometers are much too large to take into the field, and analysis takes several hours. The portable mass spectrometer being developed fits in a backpack and analyzes unknown substances immediately. A big sniffer in a little package!

In nature, putting the other guy first seems contradictory to an animal's goals of survival and passing on its genes, so researchers have been trying to understand why the blue side-blotched lizard will step forward to battle an intruding aggressor, even though it could mean sacrificing its own chances to successfully mate. Now scientists have reported the first direct evidence that cooperative behavior in side-blotched male lizards arises from their genes. The findings, published in the May 9 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by University of California--Santa Cruz's Barry Sinervo and colleagues, represent some 20 years of research into the altruistic or "self-sacrificing" behavior.

Far above the Arctic Circle, paleontologists have discovered a new fossil species that bridges the evolutionary gap between land and sea animals--an animal that is both fish and tetrapod. The skeleton indicates that the animal could support its body under the force of gravity, whether in very shallow water or on land.

Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois have put their high-powered supercomputers to work to complete the first simulation of a life form all the way down to its individual atoms, leading the way to a better understanding of all viral structures.