News
- Physics
Collider is cookin’, but is it soup?
By making the densest, hottest matter ever in a lab, smashups between fast-moving nuclei in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are coming closer than ever to reproducing the superhot, primordial fluid that presumably filled the universe immediately after the Big Bang.
- Physics
Light Stands Still in Atom Clouds
Ordinarily in continuous motion, light pulses come to a dead stop in specially prepared atom clouds.
- Health & Medicine
Found: Mutation for deadly nerve disorder
Two research teams have discovered the genetic mutation that causes familial dysautonomia, a lethal hereditary disease that causes nervous system damage.
- Health & Medicine
Radiation therapy keeps arteries clear
Two new studies add to the growing evidence that radiation treatment may keep arteries open longer after angioplasty.
-
Cells have molecule for protein triage
A molecule called CHIP slates bad proteins for destruction and may lead to heart disease therapies.
- Chemistry
New technique makes water droplets sprint
A newly developed process encourages water droplets at the hydrophobic center of a wafer to speed outward to a water-friendly edge.
- Math
Quirks of video poker
Even with perfect play over a long time, unfavorable odds and limits on how much a gambler may win per machine make playing video poker into a losing game.
- Math
Reassessing an ancient artifact
The famous Mesopotamian clay tablet known as Plimpton 322 represents an ordered list of worked examples that a teacher would use to prepare a sequence of closely related questions about squares and reciprocals for student exercises.
- Health & Medicine
Dietary stress may compromise bones
Internal conflict about what and how much to eat not only induces production of a stress hormone but also may eventually weaken bones.
- Health & Medicine
Raloxifene doesn’t hike breast density
Estrogen-replacement therapy that includes estrogen increases breast-tissue density among postmenopausal women, but the estrogen-replacement drug raloxifene doesn’t.
-
Flood’s rising? Quick, start peeing!
Malaysian ants that nest in giant bamboo fight floods by sipping from water rising inside and then dashing outdoors to pee.
-
Warblers make species in a ring
Genetic and song analyses of the greenish warblers in forests around the Tibetan Plateau suggest the birds represent a long-sought evolutionary quirk called a ring species.
