Uncategorized
- Humans
From the December 4, 1937, issue
The perfect beauty of frost rime, the sun's surprising influence on earth, and digging up evidence of ancient domestic cats.
- Earth
Water Vapor by Any Other Name
One can learn a lot by studying clouds—or just relax and soak in their beauty. Subscribers to both schools can find plenty of fodder in the British Cloud Appreciation Society’s gallery of nearly 3,200 photos. They’re organized by meteorological type, optical effects, and even by what a cloud might resemble—like “Casper the Ghost, spotted over […]
- Planetary Science
A sunlike star’s early development
A new infrared portrait of an embryonic sunlike star reveals an early, crucial step in the process of planet formation.
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Perchlorate Pump: Molecule draws contaminant into breast milk
A molecular pump meant to transport iodine also concentrates perchlorate, an environmental pollutant, in breast milk.
- Health & Medicine
Angiogenesis Factors: Tracking down the suspects in blood vessel growth near tumors
Tumors enlist certain bone marrow cells in efforts to grow new blood vessels for self-nourishment.
- Physics
15 = 3 × 5: Photons do their first quantum math
Physicists have performed the first calculation involving manipulation of the quantum states of photons, another step on the road to optical quantum computers.
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19907
I was disappointed to see optical quantum computers described as “exponentially faster than ordinary computers” in your article. Despite frequent misuse in the lay press, “exponentially” does not mean “a whole bunch.” It refers to a specific mathematical functional relationship, not merely a comparison of two numbers. The article doesn’t describe any such function. Even […]
- Earth
The Salt Flat That Isn’t Flat: World’s largest playa sports ridges, valleys
An innovative field survey of the world's largest salt flat, a New Jersey–size playa high in the Andes, reveals that the barren expanse actually has minuscule, centimeter-scale variations in topography.
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Chimp Champ: Ape aces memory test, outscores people
A young chimp outperforms college students on a test of recalling numbers glimpsed for less than a quarter of a second. With video.
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19906
When Ai, mother of the chimp Amuyu, whose mental feats you reported in this article, appeared in a television documentary a few years ago, I reproduced for myself the number-sequence test she performed and found that, after practice, I could easily outperform her. After reading about Ayumu, I tried the number-recall tests that he and […]
- Health & Medicine
Sickle Save: Skin cells fix anemia in mice
Using a new technique to turn skin cells into stem cells, scientists have corrected sickle cell anemia in mice.
- Plants
Botanists refine family tree for flowering plants
Two research teams have used the biggest array of flowering-plant genes yet to try to reconstruct the elusive evolutionary history of today's flowers.
