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  1. Humans

    Amoebas in drinking water: a double threat

    Analysis reveals widespread, hidden contamination by the sometimes lethal parasites.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Prosthetics that feel

    Re-creating a 'sense of touch' for prosthetic limbs may someday improve how people use them.

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  3. Physics

    Quantum pendulum trick explained

    Physicists explain why an object swings faster when immersed in a special ultracold liquid.

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  4. In the Zone

    Evolution may have trained the mind to see scoring streaks — even where they don't exist.

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  5. Sizing up the Electron

    Measuring the inner shape of the famous particle could help solve a cosmic mystery.

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  6. Alphabet of Life

    Searching for clues to the genetic code's origin.

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  7. Science Future for February 12, 2011

    February 15Discuss controversy over nonnative species at the University of Minnesota’s natural history museum happy hour. See www.bellmuseum.org February 17Author Sam Kean regales New York City with tales of the periodic table. Go to www.nyas.org February 17Cybersecurity experts address hazards of the digital age at Chicago’s Northwestern University. See http://c2st.org

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  8. Science Past for February 11, 1961

    RELIEVE ARTHRITIC JOINTS — Chronically inflamed arthritic joints can be relieved, but not cured, by injecting cortisone-related steroids, or hormone drugs, directly into the joint. Repeated injections, up to 142 times in one case, had no apparently harmful effect, three doctors report in the Bulletin of Rheumatic Diseases, Jan., 1961. Some 4,000 patients at the […]

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  9. Letters

    Quantum quirkinessYour special issue on quantum weirdness (SN: 11/20/10, p. 15) was certainly the best presentation I have ever seen. You folks are geniuses and what you did was little short of incredible. It will be difficult (probably impossible) to top it, but keep up the good work. As an aside, could you include more […]

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  10. Book Review: North Pole, South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism by Gillian Turner

    Review by Sid Perkins.

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  11. The Great White Bear: A Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear by Kieran Mulvaney

    Starting with the fact that polar bears have black skin, this book offers surprises and up-to-date information about the Arctic’s iconic top predator. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 251 p., $26.

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  12. Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet by K. Maria D. Lane

    Explore Mars as scientists and the public saw it around the beginning of the 20th century, when canals on the Red Planet seemed a very real possibility. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010, 265 p., $45.

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