Uncategorized
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Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution by George Gessert
An artist who works with living material considers how aesthetic values influence the ways people breed plants and animals. GREEN LIGHT: TOWARD AN ART OF EVOLUTION BY GEORGE GESSERT MIT Press, 2010, 233 p., $24.95.
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Bright Boys by Tom Green
A writer, producer and playwright tells the story of the first real-time, electronic digital computer and the people who created it. BRIGHT BOYS BY TOM GREEN A.K. Peters, 2010, 327 p., $39.
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A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC by Gian Francesco Giudice
A physicist describes the science behind the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, for a general audience. A ZEPTOSPACE ODYSSEY: A JOURNEY INTO THE PHYSICS OF THE LHC BY GIAN FRANCESCO GIUDICE Oxford Univ. Press, 2010, 276 p., $45.
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Letters
SN on the newsstand I’m blind so I’ve been reading your magazine in braille for quite a while. But most of my sighted friends have never heard of you guys. This is a great publication, and I’m glad that more readers will now become familiar with it (“Science News goes public: available on newsstands,” SN: […]
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Explaining the equation behind the oil spill disaster
Catastrophes come in all shapes and sizes, but some basic causative principles underlie most of them. Robert Bea, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied system failures from space shuttle explosions to levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina — but as a former oil rig worker he is most familiar with drilling disasters. […]
- Physics
Physics in free fall
Physicists drop supercold atoms down an elevator shaft to see what will happen.
- Humans
For sight-reading music, practice doesn’t make perfect
Individual memory differences may set upper limits on pianists’ sight-reading skill, regardless of their experience.
- Health & Medicine
Genetic defect tied to autoimmune diseases
Rare mutations in an enzyme lead to several different disorders.
- Space
All flash, no crash
New Hubble Space Telescope images confirm that Jupiter emerged unscathed from an impactor that created a fireball above the planet’s cloud tops on June 3. The new images indicate that the object exploded as a meteor in the planet’s upper atmosphere rather than plunging into the atmosphere
- Space
Kepler craft reports apparent planetary bonanza
New results from an orbiting telescope promise to more than double the number of known extrasolar planets.
- Health & Medicine
Vitamin B6 linked to lowered lung cancer risk
High levels of folate and the amino acid methionine also seem to help, a new study finds.
- Earth
Planes can trigger snowfall
Under certain conditions, aircraft can trigger precipitation as they pass through moisture-laden clouds.
