Uncategorized

Space

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander stops communicating

NASA deems the mission a full success.

Health & Medicine

Mini heart attack best treated like the big one

Patients admitted to hospitals with mild symptoms of a heart attack may benefit from getting a heart catheterization performed promptly.

Chemistry

Blueprint to repel oil and water

The texture of surfaces could be designed so that both water and oil can bead up and thus flow off.

Math

Shuffling the cards: Math does the trick

When to stop shuffling depends on the game.

Chemistry

Household cleaner makes blood removal simple!

Common household “oxy” cleaners remove blood almost too well.

Math

Book Review: The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Timothy Gowers, ed

Review by Tom Siegfried.

Science & Society

All in a Day’s Work: Careers Using Science by Megan Sullivan

NSTA Press, 2008, 140 p., $15.95.

Climate

Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat— And How to Counter It by Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig

Hill and Wang, 2008, 253 p., $25.

Science & Society

Sound reasoning requires statistical understanding

Health & Medicine

Itch

When it comes to sensory information detected by the body, pain is king, and itch is the court jester. But that insistent, tingly feeling—satisfied only by a scratch—is anything but funny to the millions of people who suffer from it chronically.

Space

Half-life (more or less)

Physicists are stirred by claims that the sun may change what’s unchangeable—the rate of radioactive decay.

Chemistry

Silk

Mimicking how spiders make their complex array of silks could usher in a tapestry of new materials, and other animals or plants could be designed to be the producers.